Wolfsbane
by 427-67Impala
Summary: Sam and Dean have been going stir-crazy at Bobby's, with no leads for almost two weeks, so something leaving a trail of torn-up bodies across the northern states is just the distraction they're looking for. Set mid-late season 4, written from Sam's POV.
1. Chapter 1

__Title:__ Wolfsbane_  
>Author:<em> 427-67Impala  
><em>Rating:<em> M  
><em>Warnings:<em> Violence, blood and gore  
><em>Word count:<em> 24,077  
><em>Setting:<em> Mid-late season 4

_Summary:_ Sam and Dean have been going stir-crazy at Bobby's, with no leads for almost two weeks, so something leaving a trail of torn-up bodies across the northern states is just the kind of distraction they're looking for. Set mid-late season 4, written from Sam's POV.

_A/N:_ This was written for the first Supernaturalaholics Big Bang Challenge (August 20, 2011). SPNaholics on Twitter - follow them!  
>Thanks (and lots of M&amp;Ms) to Melanie for being so helpful with my questions about Pennsylvanian winters (we don't get a lot of snow in Melbourne, you see) and for the translation of my Australian colloquialisms into something that might actually come out of Sam and Dean's American mouths. I maintain I'd like them to use the word 'carpark' - just once. ;)<p>

As we know, Sam and Dean belong to Kripke & co. - I'm just borrowing their toys...

* * *

><p><span>Chapter 1<span>  
><em>Williamsport, Pennsylvania<em>

It's cold at night in Pennsylvania in February. I mean, seriously cold - sensible people that don't want hypothermia stay inside. As you've probably guessed, Dean and I _weren't_ inside - we were, in fact, in a graveyard. Naturally.

It was a clear night, but the stiff breeze was _freezing_ and a series of light snow showers throughout the day had coated everything in a thin layer of powdery white like icing sugar. Under the light of the full moon, Wildwood Cemetery looked like something you might see on a Christmas card - you know, if they put cemeteries on Christmas cards.

The headstones and crypts were dusted with white snow that reflected the moonlight, making it seem almost luminous. It was kind of pretty, the way the snow contrasted with the dark green of the grass and evergreen trees and shrubs that showed through in places. It's strange what a hunter finds appealing, I suppose. But I digress.

Dean was standing under a huge old evergreen, holding his stainless steel Taurus tight with gloved hands, and I was sitting on a branch eight feet off the ground above him with a weapon of my own. When I'd first climbed into the tree nearly half an hour before, every movement sent a small shower of powdery snow raining down on him - consequently, and with much complaining, he'd pretty quickly moved slightly off to my right.

Look, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering why we were freezing our asses off in a cemetery at night in a Pennsylvanian winter. There's only ever really one reason, isn't there? We were on a monster hunt.

Well, more precisely, we were waiting for the monster to start hunting us.

* * *

><p><em>Sioux Falls, South Dakota<br>Four weeks earlier_

This whole fiasco started late on a drizzly Monday morning at Bobby's place. Dean was stretched out on the tattered red couch in the library thumbing through a relatively recent issue of _Hot Rod_ magazine, a two-foot-high stack of old hardcover books by his left arm serving as a makeshift coffee table. His half-finished can of Coke sat on the tattered cover of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, obscuring Huck's face.

While Dean was relaxing, I was sitting behind Bobby's desk actually _working_. I'd shoved piles of dusty, tattered lore books off to the side and managed to clear enough space to accommodate my laptop, and I was scouring the internet for a job. A sniff of anything that might even possibly turn into a job, actually.

You see, I was starting to get desperate. We'd come to visit Bobby after winding up our last job, a simple salt-and-burn in Minnesota; after we'd filled in the grave and finished packing the Impala, I opened my big mouth and suggested we make a quick trip to the neighbouring South Dakota. It sounded like a good idea at the time: we hadn't seen Bobby in a while, and since he was the only family we really had left (and vice versa) we'd kind of made a habit of spending New Year's in Sioux Falls if we could. But that had been almost two weeks ago.

I swear, when we landed on Bobby's doorstep, every supernatural creature in the Lower 48 went underground just to spite me.

I'd spent the last _ten days_ looking for our next job. Usually there was only a few days between cases if there was any time at all, so I was surprised when a week went by with almost no weird newspaper articles or suspicious obituaries. And the few times I did find something within 500 miles of us, one of Bobby's pals was already on it. It's rare that there are more hunters than jobs - and you'd think with Lilith trying to start the Apocalypse, things should be getting busier. But business wasn't just slow, it was _dead_. So to speak.

I looked up from the laptop and over at Dean, sprawled out on the couch and forming each word with his lips as he read. He had no clue he was doing it, and usually it didn't really bother me, but my nerves were as tight as bowstrings and that day it was driving me _crazy_. He wasn't actually saying the words, but I could hear his lips moving. My eyes narrowed slightly as I watched Dean turn the page, totally oblivious.

To be fair, it wasn't Dean's fault. He'd spent our first few days at Bobby's going over the Impala with a fine-toothed comb, doing all the little jobs that had been piling up since the last time he'd had some time to give his baby a little TLC. He cleaned the car inside and out (a long-overdue exercise, if you ask me), touched up stone chips in the paint, changed the oil and brake pads, rotated the tyres and chased down an intermittent rattle in the engine. He also spent a whole day on a heap of little engine tweaks that were a total mystery to me, and involved him almost totally dismantling the top half of the Impala's V8.

But, by about day four, Dean was getting bored. So bored in fact that he'd resorted to emptying, vacuuming and organising the hidden compartments in the trunk, and polishing every square inch of the body to such a high shine that it actually hurt my eyes to look directly at it. It was at that point Dean started to seek out other forms of amusement.

I know he loves me more than anything, but when Dean gets bored his favourite source of relief is to drive his long-suffering little brother crazy. And he's good at it. He knows exactly how to push all my buttons, because he's spent the last 20 years fine-tuning his technique.

It started with small stuff, like short-sheeting my bed. From there it escalated to hiding the laptop, itching powder in my clothes - a tried-and-tested method he knows is guaranteed to drive me mad - and then on to a new prank he'd never had the opportunity to play before: Dean hid every single sock I possessed, then watched with shameless amusement as I all but turned Bobby's house upside down looking for them.

I know, I know - why didn't I just buy new ones? Well, it can be tricky to find socks that fit me, and most of the ones I had were pretty much brand new, so I had no choice but to look for them. Also, having to buy new ones would've meant Dean had won. And I couldn't have that.

I searched Bobby's house from top to bottom for almost an hour, and even then I still had two mismatched socks - a white one and a black one. Dean, of course, just sat on the couch grinning like a Cheshire cat and either couldn't or wouldn't tell me where those last two socks were. It's that kind of juvenile stuff that absolutely does my head in.

So after more than a week of being Dean's entertainment, I was just about ready to leap across the desk and strangle him. I was actually semi-seriously considering what would be the best angle of attack after I vaulted over the desk when Bobby averted a Winchester-on-Winchester death match without even realising he was doing it.

Bobby was in the kitchen, talking on the phone as he made a cup of coffee, and snippets of the conversation drifted through into the library. "That idjit Clay Reynolds went after the thing? After it killed Eddie and Jake?" Bobby scoffed, and I looked up towards the kitchen. Dean tore his eyes away from _Hot Rod_ and craned his neck to look through the open doorway.

There was a short silence. "I know, Rufus, but what the hell kind of thing _does_ that?" Bobby asked, in reply to whatever had been said on the other end of the line. Dean sat up and his gaze shifted to me, eyebrows raised. _Sounds like a job._ I nodded, looking back at him. _Definitely._

God, I hoped it was a job.

When Bobby hung up the phone and turned around, cup of coffee in his hand, he found Dean and I looking at him expectantly from our seats. He sighed, came into the library and sat on a chair in front of his desk - he knew full well that now we knew something was up, he'd have to tell us the whole story.

"Spill it, Bobby. What's going on?" I prompted, trying to keep the enthusiasm out of my voice - I was curious about the subject of Bobby's phone conversation, yeah, but mostly I really, _really_ wanted it to be a new case_._ He took a sip of coffee, peering at me over the rim of the cup.

"There's something up around Pennsylvania way that's racking up one helluva body count. It's taken nearly forty people over the last few months, three hunters among them. Rufus was calling to tell me it got Clay Reynolds last night."

Dean blinked. "_Forty_ people? In the last few months?" he repeated incredulously, and Bobby nodded. "Thirty-eight to be exact, since October last year. Literally torn apart. It started in Maine, moved on to Massachusetts, then Connecticut, and now it's in Pennsylvania."

I tilted my head to the side as I considered that. "Around the full moon, right? Like the one tomorrow?" I asked, and Bobby nodded. "The thinking is that it's a werewolf. Rufus couldn't tell me much about the case - seems all the places this things hits are keeping it pretty quiet. Not good PR to have a wild animal tearing your citizens apart, I guess." Bobby took another sip of his coffee, and I did my best to suppress an entirely inappropriate grin. It was definitely a job - finally! I couldn't help but smile a little, and it earned me strange looks from both Bobby and Dean.

"Well, it has to be a werewolf, right? The lunar cycle is pretty convincing." I said, before either of them could ask why I was so happy about a trail of mangled bodies strewn across four states. "I don't know, boys. It looks an awful lot like a werewolf, but something don't feel right about it. This thing might be slaughtering folks under a full moon, and eating bits of them to boot, but it ain't acting like a werewolf. They're not usually so, well, _bloodthirsty_." Bobby sighed. He had to know we were going to want to go and hunt this werewolf - or whatever it was - but not being able to arm us with all the facts obviously made him uneasy.

"All right - that's all I need to hear." Dean clapped his hands together as he got up off the couch. "Get your stuff, Sammy, we're heading for Pennsylvania." And with that he headed upstairs to get his things together, leaving me with Bobby in the library.

"Your brother's easy pleased - a pile of ripped up bodies isn't something that makes a lot of folks happy." Bobby observed, and I chuckled. "Me and him both. No offence, Bobby, but one more day stuck here without a case and I might actually have had to murder him." I replied drily, and it was Bobby's turn to laugh.

"That boy knows how to push your buttons, Sam. I've been waiting for you two to get into a bare-knuckle fistfight for days now." he winked, and I gave him a smile before I went upstairs to pack up my own stuff. By the time I was done Dean was already waiting impatiently for me in the kitchen.

Bobby walked with us through the drizzle out to the gleaming Impala, now covered in tiny beads of rainwater. "You boys be careful, now. Whatever this is has killed two of the best hunters I know." he warned, as we threw our bags into the trunk. "I thought it killed three hunters?" Dean raised an eyebrow, looking back at him. "It did. But Clay Reynolds was an arrogant, incompetent ass." he replied, deadpan, and got a laugh from both of us.

"Nice, Bobby, nice." Dean grinned as he shut the trunk. "Call us if you get any new info, huh?" he added, getting into the driver's seat. "Will do." Bobby replied, the worry lines more noticeable than usual at the corners of his eyes. Something about this case was making him nervous, and he hadn't put too fine a point on it, but it wasn't often that three hunters in a row got torn apart by the same monster. This was a seriously dangerous hunt we were heading into.

"Don't worry, Bobby. We can handle this." I told him, leaning on the roof of the Impala, and he gave me a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "If anybody can, it's you two. But if you get eaten, so help me God..." he warned, leaving the sentence hanging, and Dean laughed. "What? You'll kill us?" he grinned, and Bobby chuckled. It almost disguised the anxiety, too. Almost.

"Get outta here. Go kill the thing before it eats any more innocent people." he made a shooing motion with his hands, and I joined Dean in the car. He turned the key and the engine roared to life, and we left Bobby standing in the rain trying not to look as worried as he obviously felt.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2  
><em>Williamsport, Pennsylvania<em>

When Dean and I rolled into town, it was mid-afternoon on Tuesday. We pulled into the first half-decent looking motel we saw which, unsurprisingly, had an early-American colonial theme - one of the hazards of travelling around the original colonies. I do like it better than the Wild West stuff we get down south, though.

When Dean got out of the car, he immediately groaned and pulled his jacket tight around him, collar turned up and his hands stuffed into his pockets. "Why couldn't this thing have been down in Tennessee or something? You know, where we wouldn't freeze our backsides off?" he complained, and I sighed as I climbed out to stretch my legs. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, and a stiff, bone-chilling wind that cut straight through my jeans and jacket. I must admit, it was like stepping out into a freezer.

"Well when we find this werewolf, you be sure to tell it that you'd have been much more comfortable hunting it down in Memphis." I shut the door on the Impala a little harder than was necessary, and Dean shot me a glare - for being a smartass and for slamming the door - but I ignored him.

We were both kind of crabby. We hadn't stopped driving since we left Bobby's, because we were on a pretty tight deadline - the full moon was tonight, and we had to get into town in time to go hunting. Dean and I each took turns stealing a few hours' sleep while the other drove, and on a cross-country trip like this one that was guaranteed to put us both in a bad mood. And yeah, Dean making my life miserable for the last week might've had something to do with it, too.

Dean stomped off to the motel office without another word while I zipped my jacket up right to my chin, leaned against the Impala's front quarter-panel, and took a look around. We were on the outskirts of Williamsport, a good ten minutes drive from the town centre, and the motel was set on the edge of what looked like a small forest. Evergreen trees and shrubs surrounded the wooden buildings, looking picturesque in the soft sunlight with their coating of white snow. The rooms were actually individual little cabins, scattered around a larger central building that housed the office, and the place looked like a small early-American village.

The whole scene reminded me of a chocolate box painting, but the thought of the monster that would be prowling among those trees tonight stole some of the appeal. It's also possible I might have appreciated the picturesque setting a little more if my toes hadn't been freezing in my boots. While I waited for Dean to get back from the motel office - which had a lovely wood fire going, judging by the smoking chimney that poked through the roof - I actually moved around to the front of the car and sat on the warm hood.

If I'm honest, lack of sleep and an annoying older brother weren't the only things darkening my mood. Now that the initial relief of getting back on the road had worn off, I found myself remembering the last werewolf Dean and I had hunted.

Usually, I tried not to think about Madison if I could help it. She was the latest in a line of women I'd cared about to have been torn out of my life - I mostly managed to put her out of my mind, but I still sometimes had nightmares about... well, about how it ended. But now that we were on the trail of another werewolf the memories were back, front and centre - and in full, bloody colour.

I took a few deep breaths and made a conscious effort to put those thoughts out of my head, concentrating on the snowy scenery instead. By the time Dean finally came back, a full_ ten minutes_ later, I was reasonably sure he'd deliberately drawn out check-in so as to leave his little brother standing in the cold. Payback for slamming his baby's door, I figured, and tried not to let him see me shiver. I was _freezing_, but I'll be damned if I was going to let Dean think he'd won this one.

"Cabin 19, Sammy." Dean held his hand up and dangled the key for me to see. The little smile on his face removed all doubt that he'd left me out here on purpose. "We should get changed while we're here - there's still enough daylight left to go and see the medical examiner. I wanna check out the damage for myself before we go chasing this thing." Dean went on cheerfully, ignoring the glare I gave him as he got back into the driver's seat. I got back into the passenger side wordlessly, secretly relieved to be back in the warm car, but kept an indifferent expression on my face.

"So I asked the owner about these 'animal attacks'." Dean said conversationally, putting the Impala in gear for the short drive across the gravel carpark. "Is that what took you so long?" I replied casually, and a grin flashed across Dean's face. "Over the last two nights, they've had seven bodies turn up." he went on, a smug little smile still on his lips. He was well aware I knew he'd left me outside on purpose. I shot him a glare, but he ignored me and went on as if nothing had happened.

"Local cops are saying it's a rogue wolf, and apparently the rangers from one of the nearby State Forests are hunting the thing. They're advising people on the outskirts of town to stay inside after sundown, but that's about it. They haven't made the connection with Connecticut or Massachusetts or anything yet." Dean parked the Impala out the front of Cabin 19 and killed the engine.

"They have _rangers_ hunting it?" I raised my eyebrows, and Dean sighed. That thought wiped the smile right off his face. "It's going to tear them apart." I continued, stating the obvious. "Definitely. Silver rounds aren't standard issue in the Forest Service." Dean agreed, and steeled himself against the cold before he opened the door. The wind, which felt like it was blowing straight down from the Arctic, flooded into the car and immediately stole every last drop of warmth from the air. Dean was right - this hunt would have been much less unpleasant in Tennessee.

Moving as quickly as we could in our hurry to get out of the cold, we grabbed our bags from the trunk and went straight for the cabin door. The lock was sticky - a combination of age and the cold - but when Dean finally got the door open, we were both pleasantly surprised by what we found.

There were two queen-size beds with chunky pine frames, adorned with plenty of thick blankets and some comfortable-looking pillows. The floor was covered in that indestructible kind of carpet beloved by motels and other public buildings everywhere, in a dark shade of tan that hid the ingrained dirt nicely, and the walls were a pleasant buttermilk colour. There were a handful of pictures of colonial and Civil War scenes hanging around the room, adding nicely to the early-American ambience. Like I said, much better than cattle skulls and cacti.

Dean, as usual, took the bed closest to the door and I threw my stuff onto the other one. I smiled when I sat down to pull off my shoes - the mattress was surprisingly firm and lump-free. "Not bad, huh Sam?" Dean observed, taking some pretty clean, mostly-unwrinkled clothes from his bag. A heavy jacket over some generic khaki, hiking boots and a fake Forest Service ID was enough to fool people into thinking we were the real deal.

"The themed places usually worry me, but this is kind of nice." I agreed, looking around. Near the foot of my bed there was a door leading to a small but well-equipped bathroom, and a little kitchenette occupied the other end of the cabin. It had a couple of electric hotplates - the metal spiral kind - and a microwave and coffee-maker, which was all Dean and I ever needed. The kitchen table and chairs, again, were pine - they had hard-wearing canvas cushions on the seats, and they looked like they wouldn't collapse if I sat on them. Altogether, the room was nicer than we were used to. Off-peak rates, I guess - must be hard to attract tourists in near-Arctic temperatures.

My examination of the cabin was interrupted by a hoot of delight from Dean, who was now standing over by the TV. "Hey, look - we even get cable." he grinned, holding up the small cardboard sign that had been resting on top of the set. I looked closer, and rolled my eyes when I realised why he was grinning - the sign was an advertisement for _Casa Erotica_.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The Williamsport city morgue was a plain, uninteresting brick building, like most of the other morgues we'd visited over the years. As soon as we walked through the glass doors into the beige lobby, we were hit by the familiar tang of pine disinfectant and Dean reflexively wrinkled his nose.

"I hate that smell." he said under his breath, taking his fake Forest Service ID from his jacket pocket. "Better than what they've got in their fridges, I guess." I observed, getting out my own ID. Dean pursed his lips and tilted this head slightly to the side in his 'yeah, you're right about that' expression. The smell of disinfectant was _miles_ better than decomposing flesh.

We strode up to the reception counter, doing our best law-enforcement impression, but the woman sitting behind it didn't even look up. After a few seconds watching her typing furiously, I cleared my throat. I got no response and glanced over at Dean, who shrugged unhelpfully. Almost half a minute later, only when she had finished typing, did the receptionist finally look up to see who was standing in front of her.

I blinked a couple of times when she did. She was _gorgeous_, and I didn't need to look over at Dean to know his jaw was just about on the floor. I immediately realised I was going to have to do the talking, because I knew Dean's mind would be on something else entirely - the only problem was that my mind had also gone inconveniently blank when I saw her.

"How can I help you?" she asked, pleasant and business-like. She folded her manicured hands on the desk in front of her and looked from me to Dean. I guessed she was in her late twenties, with straight chestnut hair that fell just past her shoulders and was held back from her face by a couple of silvery combs. She wore very little makeup on her creamy skin, with sparingly-applied mascara highlighting her chocolate-coloured eyes and dewy pink gloss accentuating her full lips. I could understand why Dean was speechless.

After a couple of seconds' pause and a small cough, I managed to make my mouth move. "Hello," I started, and glanced at the nametag pinned to her dusky pink blouse, "Mia. I'm Officer Glover, and this is Officer Blackmore." I continued, flashing my ID and kicking Dean discreetly in the shin to remind him to do the same. Thankfully, he managed to hold his ID up the right way as he flipped it open. Mia gave them a cursory glance and looked back to me, oblivious to the ruse.

"We're from the Forest Service, and we were hoping to talk to the medical examiner about the victims of the animal attacks." I said, and Mia regarded both of us with a professional detachment. Dean was making a concerted effort to catch her eye, but this woman was apparently immune to his million-watt flirting smile. Her expression didn't change as he leaned on the desk and turned its full power loose on her, and I cringed inwardly.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you, but my brother has a one-track mind and you didn't have to be a mind-reader to know what he was thinking. I would have put money on the fact that he was imagining his own personal _Casa Erotica_, starring the lovely Mia - and, if I'm honest, the thought kind of appealed to me too. Unlike my brother, though, I can keep my mind on the job even in the presence of beautiful women. However much my hormones might protest. And believe me, they were protesting.

Mia, fortunately, either didn't notice or didn't care what we were thinking. "You'll find Dr. Earnshaw in his office, just down the hallway." she indicated a tea-green, hospital-like corridor to our left with a wave of her hand, diamantes in her French-manicured acrylic nails glinting.

"Thanks." I started off down the hallway, and almost had to drag Dean along behind me. He frowned as we walked, taking a look over his shoulder back towards the reception desk. Mia was absorbed in her typing again, not paying him any attention at all. "Think you can keep your mind on the job, Casanova?" I asked drily, and Dean's frown deepened. He didn't like it when gorgeous women ignored him.

At that point, I decided to conduct a little experiment. "Dean, what's this doctor's name?" I asked, wearily. He opened his mouth to answer, but shut it again after a few seconds. He had no clue.

I sighed. Just as I thought, Dean hadn't heard a word the receptionist had said. "Dr. Earnshaw. His office is down this corridor somewhere." I reiterated, checking the signs on the closed doors as we passed them. "Right." Dean said confidently, and I gave him a look. "I was distracted, okay?" he retorted, and I rolled my eyes. Yeah, right - 'distracted'. See? One-track mind.

Before I could admonish him further, we came upon a door with a panel of frosted glass in it that read _Dr. D. Earnshaw - Medical Examiner_. The doorframe was painted a slightly darker green than the corridor, and the black adhesive letters on the glass were peeling at the corners. I raised my hand to knock, but the door swung open before my knuckles touched it.

Standing in the doorway was a heavyset man in his late forties, with greying dirty blonde hair and wire-rim spectacles over blue eyes. He wore a white lab coat, white business shirt and black trousers, with a pair of beaten-up cross-trainers on his feet.

"Dr. Earnshaw." Dean said, flashing his badge as I did the same. He gave me a pointed look, as if to say _See? I know what's going on._ "Officers Blackmore and Glover, from the Forest Service. We're here about the animal attacks." he continued, in his best authoritative tone, and the doctor blinked a couple of times behind his glasses. He didn't exactly look pleased to see us.

"We were hoping you could show us the bodies, Doctor. We've got a few questions we need answered before we can find whatever's doing this." I told him, not entirely untruthfully. We _did_ need to check some facts before we went hunting. "Can't you wait for my report?" Dr. Earnshaw asked, after a short pause.

"We'd prefer to see for ourselves." Dean replied, in his _I'm afraid I'll have to insist_ voice. The doctor sighed and checked his watch like he had somewhere to be. "Okay, Officers - follow me." Dr. Earnshaw shut his office door behind him and led Dean and I off down the hallway and deeper into the building. The further we got from the reception desk, the stronger the disinfectant smell was.

"So you think these deaths are a result of animal attacks?" I asked, while we walked. Dr. Earnshaw paused as we came to the top of a flight of stairs, thinking carefully before he answered. He wore the familiar expression of someone trying to reconcile something inexplicable with what he thought he knew about the world - it was a look Dean and I saw often from cops and MEs struggling to explain the carnage left behind by something supernatural.

"Well, I've found wolf hair on all the victims so far, so the current theory is that it's a rabid wolf. But honestly, the bodies look more like they were torn up by a bear." The doctor's tone was sterile and business-like as he checked his watch again, then started quickly down the stairs. Obviously, we _were_ keeping him from something.

"Isn't it the wrong time of year for bears?" Dean asked, and Dr. Earnshaw shrugged. "I don't know how else to explain it. Those folks were torn up in a way I've only ever seen from big carnivores and bears, and there are no mountain lions or anything around here." he said, as we reached the bottom of the stairs. The ME pushed open a set of green double doors under a sign that proclaimed _Autopsy_, and led us inside.

The windowless room was cold and clean, and the floor and the bottom two-thirds of the walls were covered in off-white tiles. It was illuminated by bright fluorescent lights that glinted off a trio of stainless steel autopsy tables, and what wall space remained untiled was painted a similar light green to the hallway and stairwell we'd come through on our way down. Dean wrinkled his nose again as we were assaulted by a fresh, stronger wave of pine disinfectant. Down here, it didn't quite cover the _eau de decomposition_ - I tried to breathe through my mouth, but in all honesty it didn't help much.

Dr. Earnshaw went over to a stainless steel cart that held various nasty-looking surgical tools - the big ones, like shears for cutting ribs - and picked up a clipboard. He handed it to Dean, who looked from the clipboard to the doctor as if to say _So what am I meant to do with this?_

"All the paperwork on the victims is here, and the bodies are in the fridge." the doctor motioned to the rows of 3-foot-square stainless steel doors set into the far wall of the autopsy room. "Got somewhere to be, doc?" Dean asked, eyebrows raised. Dr. Earnshaw looked at the clock on the wall and pursed his lips. "As a matter of fact, I do. So, if you don't need me for anything else..." he left the sentence unfinished and looked from me to Dean, obviously hoping we didn't.

"Can we get a copy of the paperwork?" I asked, and the doctor waved his hand at the clipboard Dean was holding. "Keep those if you like." He made a quick exit through the double doors before we could ask him anything else, and left us alone with the clipboard and a familiar wall of numbered stainless steel fridges.

"Wonder where he's off to." Dean mused, looking at the double doors as they swung gently back and forth in ever-decreasing arcs. "I mean, what does a medical examiner do for fun?" he went on, picking up a random, nasty-looking piece of stainless steel equipment from the cart for a closer look.

"I bet the smell of disinfectant and rotting flesh does wonders for his social life. If he stays home, it's probably even hard to watch TV - all those procedural cop shows must drive him crazy." Dean looked over at me for a response, and I gave him a look of mild disinterest. I really didn't care what Dr. Earnshaw was doing with his evening.

"No? Okay." he put the tool down on the cart with a sigh and moved onto a new topic. "Why are morgues always underground? It's cold and creepy and the ventilation sucks." Dean complained, handing me the clipboard as he went over to the fridge doors. "I imagine it makes refrigeration easier." I answered, even though I knew it was a rhetorical question. It irritated Dean when I answered rhetorical questions, which is precisely why I did it. After the last two weeks, he had it coming.

"So who's our first customer?" Dean ignored my little grin, and I scanned the front page on the clipboard. It was list of the fridge's occupants, and apparently the morgue was close to capacity. "Number 9 - Thomas Whitman." I decided, flipping through to the report on Mr. Whitman as Dean opened up the door. "Male, Caucasian, 5'11", 160lb..." I read out loud, but trailed off as he pulled out the sliding tray. A bloodstained white sheet was covering what was obviously not a whole body anymore, and any levity that had been in the room evaporated.

"Was the heart taken?" Dean asked, a little grimace on his face. He took hold of the sheet, but didn't pull it back just yet. He knew as well as I did that it wasn't going to be pretty. I skimmed Thomas' autopsy report, and it produced a grimace of my own. "The heart is missing, yeah, but apparently so is a lot of other stuff. I think the body is so torn up it's going to be hard to tell if what's missing was taken deliberately or just by coincidence."

"Okay." Dean sighed. "Let's see what we're dealing with." He took a deep breath before he drew back the sheet, and what I saw under there turned my stomach.

Thomas Whitman's remains looked more like a pile of butcher's waste than a corpse. His torso was torn open from throat to navel and parts of him were obviously missing, including most of his internal organs. Eaten by whatever had torn him to ribbons, probably, although this level of damage could just as easily have been inflicted by putting the body through a meat grinder.

There were clear bite marks on what was left of the body, where huge hunks of muscle had been torn from the legs, arms and back, and Dr. Earnshaw had been right when he said it looked like the work of a bear. I'd certainly never seen a werewolf rip away whole pieces of a victim like this before.

A whole section of Whitman's ribcage had been torn from his chest, and it was obvious the heart was missing - along with the lungs, liver, and a few other things. His bloodied face was frozen in an expression of pure terror, eyes wide and mouth open in a silent scream, and his short black hair was matted with his own blood.

"Jesus Christ." Dean muttered under his breath, looking at one of the bites in the man's quadriceps. A section of muscle the size of a pot roast was just _gone_. What was left of the body must have weighed dozens of pounds less than when Thomas Whitman was alive.

Dean took a slightly shaky breath and pulled the sheet back up before he slid the tray back into the fridge and shut the door. "Where's the next one?" he asked quietly, but I didn't answer right away. My mind was preoccupied with the mental image of what remained of Thomas Whitman. Mostly, I wondered what kind of werewolf was capable of doing that to a human being - I knew they were vicious, and I'd seen some thoroughly mangled corpses left in their wake, but this kind of damage was something new.

"Sam - where's the next one?" Dean repeated, more forcefully. I tore my eyes away from the fridge door, blinking as I looked back down at the clipboard. I flipped through a couple more pages, deliberately avoiding the entry on Clay Reynolds. We didn't need to see what this thing had done to the last hunter it ran into.

Dean looked at me expectantly, silently waiting. "There's another victim behind door number 10 - um, Susan Delgado." I took a deep breath. "5'7", 120lb. She was out jogging in a park when she was attacked." I watched as Dean opened door number 10 and slid out the tray. Again, the damage was obvious even before he pulled back the sheet.

Susan Delgado hadn't fared any better than Thomas Whitman. Her chest had also been ripped open; almost the entire front portion of her ribcage had been torn out, and I could only see scraps of lung left in her chest cavity. Her slim, athletic frame was also missing huge chunks of muscle, and even the bottom half of her left leg - it had been torn off at the knee, and there were pieces of white ligament and tendon dangling from the wound.

Unlike Thomas Whitman, however, there was no expression of terror on her face. Whatever had killed Susan Delgado had raked claws diagonally from her left temple across to the point of her jaw on the right, and what skin and muscle hadn't been cleaved clean off the bone was an unrecognisable mess of bloody, torn flesh. Her entire body was covered in her own blood, and it stained her long blonde hair and pale skin a murky maroon.

Dean replaced the sheet and slid the body back into the fridge wordlessly, pushing the door closed with a metallic _click_ of the latch. He put a hand to his mouth and closed his eyes, silently thinking over what he'd just seen. "I've never seen a werewolf do damage like that." I said quietly, taking the papers out of the clipboard and folding them up before I put them in my jacket pocket.

"We've never seen _anything_ do damage like that." Dean sighed, and opened his eyes. "The local cops or the actual Forest Service aren't equipped to handle this, Sam - when they start shooting it, they're just gonna make it mad. We gotta go after it, cause we know what we're dealing with." He had a point, I know, but after what we'd just seen neither of us were exactly thrilled about it.

I followed Dean out through the double doors and we walked up the stairs silently, both of us lost in our own thoughts. "Look, a werewolf's a werewolf. We've got plenty of silver bullets, and we can bring this thing down." Dean said to no-one in particular, when we got to the top of the stairs. He sounded so confident that I almost believed him. "Hopefully before it kills anyone else." I said, and a chill ran down my spine as I remembered the horrors hidden beneath the bloodied sheets behind us.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Back at the motel, Dean opened the trunk and broke out the silver bullets. I loaded a full clip for both of us and also a spare each - just in case. I wasn't about to take chances with something tearing pot-roast sized chunks out of its victims. No way was I going to get eaten because I hadn't brought enough ammunition.

"So where are we going to look for this thing?" I asked, setting my black Beretta and Dean's stainless steel Taurus on the kitchen table. It was covered with morgue paperwork and a huge map of Williamsport that we'd picked up from a gas station on the way back from our visit to the delightful Dr. Earnshaw. Dean had marked the locations of each body with a red Sharpie, and there was an immediately obvious cluster of little blood-red Xs.

"The morgue paperwork says they found the bodies on the northern outskirts of town, away from the river towards the hills." Dean tapped the grouping of Sharpie crosses with his index finger. "There's a nice, big park here where most of the bodies turned up. If I were a werewolf, I'd be there hunting easy prey - joggers like Susan Delgado." he went on, and I sniffed. "Or the hunters lying in wait."

Dean looked up at me, an amused expression on his face. "I think the silver bullets move us out of the 'easy prey' category, Sammy. But you know, if you're scared, you can stay here."

I looked back at him witheringly, not even bothering to dignify that with a response. My brother, the comedian. I might not be mad keen on running around in the dark looking for a half-wolf half-human monster, but what Dean had said in the morgue was exactly right: we had to do it, because we knew how.

"What do you think about the wolf hair?" I asked, in an effort to change the subject. I picked up the analysis of the hair found on Thomas Whitman and looked it over - apparently, the ME had found hairs belonging to _Canis lupus_ on his body. I know that probably seems like a reasonable thing to find on a werewolf victim - but werewolves aren't supposed to grow actual wolf hair when they change.

Dean thought about my question for a minute before he answered. "It's gotta be incidental, right? Maybe a wolf sniffed around the body after the werewolf was done with it?" he offered, and I shrugged. "Yeah, maybe." That explanation didn't sit well with me, but as yet I didn't have a better one. "Add that to the list of weird stuff going on with this job." Dean told me, and went back to the map.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

That night at about 9pm, an hour before moonrise, Dean and I loaded up and headed out into the cold Pennsylvania night. It wasn't a long drive to Brandon Park, and the Impala's engine didn't even warm up enough to bother turning on the heater.

The wind was still freezing - even more so, now the sun was gone - and the grass in the park was still covered in a light coating of snow. But the sky was still relatively clear and Mother Nature hadn't added any fresh powder since we arrived in town, so it was more like a bad frost. It wasn't even enough to make noise as we walked through it.

Dean and I stood just inside the park gates and looked around. There was a network of paths winding through tidy expanses of snowy grass and around stands of trees. The lighting wasn't awesome, but the full moon made up for that - its silver light was bright enough that I could even see the bandshell in the distance. "So where do we start?" I asked, looking over at Dean.

He considered my question for a few seconds before he answered. "Guess we've just gotta look around. I mean, the werewolf will probably find us anyway." he said, with a shrug. "Isn't that a comforting thought." I sighed, and checked my Beretta one more time before I tucked it back into the waistband of my jeans. "Hey, maybe it'll even find us before it kills anyone else." Dean's voice was cheery as he walked off down a path to his right, and I followed with a few quick steps. It's odd, what makes a hunter happy.

Naturally, the werewolf _didn't_ find us. Instead, Dean and I wandered aimlessly around the park by moonlight for over an hour and saw only two people the entire time. At about 10:30pm, we sat down for a rest on one of a row of stone benches.

"At this rate we're gonna freeze to death before this thing shows its face." I said, pulling my jacket tighter around me and burying my chin in my scarf. I'd thought it was cold in the _daytime_! Despite wearing two pairs of socks, my feet felt like ice blocks - I was glad I was wearing gloves, because otherwise I'm sure I would've had frostbite.

"Would you rather hunt it in Tennessee?" Dean replied teasingly, a smug little smile on his face. I shot him a look, but he went right on smiling.

I was about to come back with a spectacular retort of my own when a gunshot rang out from a stand of trees nearby. Dean and I exchanged a look, and another shot came as we were getting up off the bench. The second shot was followed closely by a scream - a shrill shriek of terror, that was itself followed by a deep, animal snarl. Dean started running then, gun drawn and safety off, headed for the thicket. I followed only a few steps behind, my climbing heart rate not entirely due to the sudden burst of activity. Running _towards_ the supernatural killing machine tends to jumpstart your pulse, you know?

The trees were a mix of evergreens and stick-like deciduous species, with smaller bushes interspersed between their trunks and a gap at opposite ends to accommodate a concrete path. There was a roughly-circular clearing in the middle, about the size of the average suburban backyard, the trees screening it from the rest of the park. The opening in the canopy of the trees let the full moon shine down through wispy clouds to illuminate the scene almost like daylight.

Dean reached the clearing just ahead of me, and skidded to a sudden stop. I heard him swear under his breath as I pulled up behind his left shoulder, crashing into him and almost knocking him over. I opened my mouth to ask why the hell he'd come to a screeching halt, but the question died on my lips when I looked up and saw what was happening in the clearing.

When I followed Dean down the path into the thicket, I thought I knew what to expect. I'd gotten up-close and personal with Madison after she'd wolfed out, and that wasn't something I was going to forget anytime soon. She'd had yellow eyes, fangs, claws, and supernatural speed and strength; but most disturbingly, she'd still looked kind of human. She didn't grow fur all over her body like in the movies, and she'd still had human limbs and her human face - for the most part, anyway. But the creature I saw in front of me didn't look anything _like_ Madison.

The werewolf in the clearing didn't look human at all. It looked for all the world like an actual wolf, but it was immediately obvious that this wasn't just a rogue timberwolf down from the hills looking for an easy meal. Mother Nature never came up with an animal quite like this one.

The first thing that struck me about the werewolf was its sheer _size_ - it was easily four feet tall at the shoulder, and eight or nine feet long from its nose to the tip of its tail. It was covered in coarse charcoal-coloured hair so dark it was nearly black, and must have weighed nearly 350lb.

The werewolf had a broad, deep chest, accentuated by a slim waist that pulled in sharply at the end of its ribcage. Its legs were long and powerful, and ended in huge paws that were bigger than my hand. Where a wolf's short nails would be, there were three-inch weapons that could only be described as talons - they looked like they were made of sharp, hooked onyx.

Its thick neck led up to a huge, heavy skull with a wide, flat forehead. The wolf's eyes were ice-blue, like you might see on an Alaskan malamute, and its long, blunt muzzle was full of sharp white teeth. Just the _sight_ of the thing set primitive warning bells ringing in my brain, and every instinct I had wanted me to turn and run as fast as I possibly could in the opposite direction.

I knew we should _do_ something instead of just standing there and staring, but it was like watching a car crash and I couldn't tear my eyes away. The werewolf's victim - a dark-haired, olive-skinned man in his mid-thirties - was sitting against a tree at the other end of the clearing with his back pressed against the trunk. I immediately pegged him as a big game hunter: he wore a green camouflage outfit and carried a high-end, large calibre bolt action rifle that had its own camouflage pattern painted on. There was a set of long, bloody gashes in the front of his jacket where the wolf had raked its paw across his abdomen, probably resulting in the scream that brought us running. The hunter was frantically working the action on the rifle in his hands, but the weapon was hopelessly jammed.

As it approached the defenceless man, the werewolf's lips pulled back in a vicious snarl and its four-inch canine teeth gleamed like steel in the moonlight. Realising he couldn't free the stuck shell, the hunter instead swung the stock of his rifle at the beast and it growled: a deep, resonating sound that echoed off the trees surrounding the clearing and made my blood run cold. No natural wolf could have made a noise like that - a low, savage rumble that resonated with something primal in my subconscious, and set the instinctive warning bells ringing with renewed vigour.

A chill of primeval fear rolled over me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Dean's gun come up in front of him. His eyes were wider than I thought possible, but his hands were dead steady as he took aim at the wolf. I realised with a shiver that he was going to draw its attention and make it come at us so he could get a shot at the heart, and every fibre of my being screamed at me that it was probably a very dumb idea. Dumb even for us.

The sound of the shot reverberated off the tree trunks and I saw Dean's bullet strike the animal in the shoulder. It stopped advancing on the helpless hunter and swung its huge head to look at the two humans standing at the other end of the clearing. Its ears flattened back against its skull and its eyes locked on Dean, and on the gleaming Taurus in his hands.

They stayed like that for a few seconds, the wolf staring murderously at Dean. The beast almost looked like it was considering whether to attack the guys with the guns, or finish off the prey in front of it. My eyes widened as it actually took half a step in our direction, but then the injured hunter let out a small, involuntary whimper of pain and the wolf's head snapped back around to him. He barely had time to draw the knife hanging from his belt before the beast attacked.

As Dean and I watched on in stunned, helpless horror, the man screamed again and slashed at the animal in a desperate attempt to save himself. The werewolf hung back for a moment and waited for the knife to reach the end of its arc, then was on the hunter before he could bring it around for a second try. The hunter's screech of terror became a howl of pain as the werewolf wrapped its jaws around his left shoulder and clamped down, planting a giant paw on the man's stomach to hold him still.

The muzzle of the enormous black wolf was long enough that its canines bit into the flesh below its victim's pectoral muscle at the front and at the bottom of his shoulderblade in the back. The man's arms and legs flailed wildly as the werewolf's jaws snapped shut, its teeth slicing through skin and muscle like a hot knife through butter. There was an audible cracking noise as it crunched through the hunter's collarbone and shoulderblade, and his cry of pain became a strangled whine when his ribs gave way under the pressure and the wolf's massive canine teeth tore into his left lung and then into his heart.

I could see the bulging muscles that powered the beast's jaws moving as it gnawed at its prey. The man wasn't making any noise at all now, and the werewolf worrying at his shoulder was producing what little movement there was in his body. The entire left side of the man's torso was stained dark under the moonlight by the scarlet waterfall of blood from the huge wound, and I knew there was nothing we could do for him now.

Only seconds after it bit into him, the werewolf ripped a chunk right out of the man's chest with a sickening wet tearing sound. It took everything between his neck and left shoulder, leaving a gaping wound that extended down a full twelve inches into his torso. His left arm fell onto the ground at his side, now attached only by a thin strip of flesh and splintered rib segments that had once been the side of his chest wall. What remained of his shoulder now hung at roughly the same level as his navel.

"Oh God." I breathed, as the werewolf crunched the man's ribs and collarbone into fragments with a few movements of its jaw, before swallowing the mess of pulverised bone, bloody flesh and ragged chunks of organ. I half-expected it to raise its head and start howling at the moon right then, but instead it turned its gaze back on us.

Dean raised his gun again as the wolf started to stalk towards us, its bloodstained teeth bared in a ferocious snarl. As soon as he had a clear shot at its heart, he emptied his remaining rounds into the werewolf's broad chest one after the other until the Taurus clicked empty.

I didn't expect what happened next. To the considerable surprise of both Dean and I, the wolf didn't collapse onto the ground in a bloody, dying heap - it stopped its advance and looked at Dean, growling low in its chest as if it hadn't just been shot multiple times with little chunks of werewolf poison.

I knew there was no way Dean had missed its heart. Any one of those shots should've killed it instantly where it stood. The fact that the monster was still alive meant we weren't dealing with a werewolf, and _that_ meant our guns full of silver bullets might as well have been water pistols for all the good they were going to do us. The thought made the bottom drop out of my stomach.

I glanced over at Dean, his eyes wide with the same realisation I'd just had. As he stared into the wolf, its cold blue eyes bright with an unsettling intelligence, I got the distinct and chilling impression the beast was considering whether or not it should charge us. I could almost hear the wheels turning in its mind as it licked its lips.

Before I knew it my Beretta was up in front of me, my hands on total autopilot as they aimed, and the gaze between Dean and the werewolf was suddenly interrupted as I shot it in the head. I wasn't about to let it tear me apart without even firing a shot, and you never know - it might've worked.

Of course, it didn't. The beast gave a sharp yowl and pulled back, shaking its head like it had been stung by bee or something. And it might as well have been, for all the damage the bullet did. There was a small, bloody tear in the wolf's skin just above its right eye, but being shot in the head with silver at point-blank range hadn't been nearly as fatal as I'd hoped. It must have hurt, though, because the werewolf snarled savagely at me and backed off a few steps as it considered its options. Before I could shoot it again, it turned and grabbed what was left of the hunter in its jaws before loping off into the trees with its kill.

I frowned and lowered the gun slightly as I watched it go, then looked over at Dean. He was watching the trees with an expression of shock and confusion. "Dean, that's no werewolf." I said, quietly. I knew I was stating the obvious, but I didn't know what else to say. "I know." he took a deep breath, pulling the spare clip from his jeans, and deliberately avoided meeting my eyes as he reloaded his Taurus with slightly shaky hands. He watched the trees the whole time for any sign of the werewolf - or whatever it was.

There are few things that literally strike fear into the hearts of hunters, but being eaten alive is one of them. It's a basic, primal fear - the kind that makes your heart skip beats and turns your blood to ice - and take it from me, it's bad enough when you _haven't_ been torn to ribbons by a Hellhound. After the things he'd gone through, I couldn't even _begin_ to imagine what terrible things were going through Dean's head right then. His ashen face made me think I didn't want to know.

"We've gotta get out of here, Dean. If that thing comes back, we're dead." I put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn't respond. He was off in his own little world, eyes fixed on the darkened patch on the grass where the wolf had torn the hunter apart before our eyes. The blood looked black under the moonlight.

"Dean! We have to go!" I spun my brother around and shoved him back in the direction we came from - right then, I wanted nothing more than to get as far away from this Godforsaken park as possible. Dean shook his head like he was trying to clear it, and his eyes focused on me. There was a haunted look on his face as he ran a shaky hand back over his hair. "Let's get the hell out of here." he flicked the safety back on, but didn't put the gun away as we turned tail and ran back to where we'd left the Impala.

Neither of us said a word on the drive back to our cabin, but I didn't have to be a mind-reader to know what Dean was thinking. He hadn't ever drawn me a picture, but he'd told me what a Hellhound looked like and this werewolf was the very image of the beast that dragged him to Hell.

Dean kept his eyes fixed firmly on the road in front of us, gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles were white - every time he loosened his grip, his hands would start shaking again. He didn't look over at me, but I could see that haunted look was still on his face. The similarities between that werewolf and a Hellhound obviously weren't lost on him, and coming face-to-face with it must have dragged up some things he wished he could forget.

As soon as we got inside the cabin and locked the door securely behind us, Dean produced two glasses from a kitchen cabinet and poured us both a drink while I sat at the kitchen table and dialled Bobby's number. I put the phone on speaker and set it down on the table, then took the glass Dean held out to me. We both downed our whiskey in one shot and I handed my empty glass back to him, and he refilled both without saying a word. The haunted look was gone but he looked pale and drawn, with bright red spots high on his cheeks. I figured I probably didn't look much better - I was feeling bad enough to drink Dean's cheap whiskey, after all. Usually, I avoided that stuff like the plague.

Bobby answered on the ninth ring, sounding sleepy and irritated. _"Dammit, Sam, do you know what time it is?"_ he demanded, by way of a greeting.

That threw me, and I paused before I answered. "Um - I don't know. Late, I think." I replied, blinking. I took the refilled glass Dean offered me and took a deep break before I went on. "Look, Bobby, we've got a problem." I said, before the grumpy hunter could launch into a lecture about not waking people up in the small hours of the morning. I wasn't in the mood for that.

"It's about the werewolf." Dean interjected, as I took a deep breath and drank down half my whiskey. God, it tasted terrible.

_"What about the damn werewolf?"_ Bobby still sounded irritated, but there was a note of concern tempering his annoyance now.

"We're not even sure it _is_ a werewolf." Dean said, and there was a silence on the other end of the phone.

_"What do you mean, you're 'not sure it's a werewolf'?"_ Bobby asked slowly, and I could just imagine him narrowing his eyes.

"We got a look at the thing tonight while it was tearing into some poor guy that was trying to shoot it with a hunting rifle." I began, and then paused as my mind started replaying the scene.

_"And?"_

"It's not a werewolf, Bobby." Dean scrubbed a hand over his face. "It looked more like an actual wolf. A _big_ one - like, the size of a lion. At least four feet tall at the shoulder." I said, and there was another silence on Bobby's end.

_"You're sure it's not a Skinwalker? Or even a wild wolf that came down from the hills looking for some easy prey?" _Bobby didn't sound hopeful, even as he was asking the question.

"This isn't a Skinwalker or some random wolf from the hills!" Dean snapped, then drained his glass and almost slammed it down on the table. I gave him a warning look, and he narrowed his eyes at me. "I emptied a full clip of silver bullets into it, and it didn't even slow down! It looked right at me, and I swear to God, it saw my gun and considered whether to attack or not. It _thought it though_." Dean continued, just as intensely but a little more quietly. He took a deep breath and sat heavily in the chair opposite me.

"Honestly, Bobby, it seems more like a human wolf than a wolf-man." I mused, remembering the intelligence in the wolf's eyes when it looked at us. "I might as well have been shooting it with a BB gun. No wonder it's killed the last three hunters that went after it." Dean frowned as he looked at the mostly-empty plastic tray of silver bullets on the table in front of him. "Your bullet to the head hurt it, though." he added, looking at me thoughtfully.

_"You shot it in the _head_?"_ Bobby asked incredulously, and I shrugged. "I wasn't about to let it eat me with a full clip left in my Beretta." I replied, deadpan. That got a little smile from Dean.

_"Okay, Rambo. Any other details you can gimme before I hit the books?"_ I could imagine Bobby shaking his head as he thought about me shooting a werewolf between the eyes.

I looked at Dean, who shrugged - it was apparently up to me to explain. "Well, it's definitely only been killing people around the full moon - the two nights before and the night of. It was a four-foot-tall black wolf with bright blue eyes, canines that must've been four inches long and claws that would've been nearly the same length." I said, and heard a pen scratching on paper as Bobby wrote it down. "And get this - the ME found wolf hair on the bodies."

_"Werewolves don't grow wolf hair."_ he replied, as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Like Dean and I didn't already know that.

"Yeah, Bobby, we know. Like we said, this isn't a werewolf." Dean rolled his eyes.

"It eats parts of its victims, but we can't say for sure whether it was specifically after the heart or not - their chest cavities were pretty much empty, and it also ate a lot of muscle tissue." I went on, wincing as I remembered the half-eaten bodies in the morgue. After what we'd seen the wolf do tonight, I was starting to think those people had gotten off easy.

_"Okay, boys. Don't get yourselves eaten before I can work out how to kill this thing."_

"Don't worry, Bobby, we're not going back out there until we have something to kill it with." Dean assured him. The colour was slowly returning to his face, but he still looked like crap.

_"Right. Stay the hell inside, and I'll call you when I know something."_

After I hung up the phone, Dean and I sat at the kitchen table in silence for a minute before he spoke. "You know, just because we're not going outside doesn't mean that wolf won't come in here." he said slowly, trying not to put too fine a point on it. I'd been thinking it too, but hearing Dean say it out loud made me shiver. "Well, we've already got salt lines down. Wanna add some goofer dust?" I offered, and Dean shook his head. "Nah. If the salt doesn't stop it the goofer dust won't."

I frowned a little as I looked over at the bright white lines at all the windows and by the front door. On most jobs, salt lines were enough to keep out whatever might want to hunt us. Spirits, demons - Hellhounds, even. Salt usually equalled safety, but not tonight. Consequently, after Dean and I had drunk enough to feel like hitting the hay, I spent most of the night lying awake in the dark watching the windows. We kept the guns loaded with silver rounds within arm's reach, for all the good they were going to do us if the wolf showed up.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

I must've fallen asleep at some point, because when I woke up the weak morning sun was shining through the gaps in the curtains and Dean was already at the kitchen table drinking his coffee and watching the morning news.

"Look." He didn't even bother saying 'good morning', he just nodded towards the TV and turned up the volume. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, blinking at the small colour screen in the corner of the room.

"In other news, local man Patrick Danville was found dead near Brandon Park this morning, after apparently being mauled by an animal." the pretty brunette anchor was saying, in that serious voice unique to newsreaders. There was a picture hovering over her left shoulder, and I immediately recognised it as the big game hunter the werewolf had torn apart in front of us the night before. Having a name to put to the face only served to make last night's events more horrific.

"Police and park rangers are refusing to be drawn on whether Mr. Danville was killed by the same animal responsible for the recent spate of deaths in the northern Williamsport area." she continued, and the picture cut to a sergeant from the local police department standing in Brandon Park, near the clearing. The area was ringed with yellow crime scene tape and people from the ME's office were taking away a distinctly deflated-looking body bag.

"We're working closely with rangers from the nearby national parks, to find the animal - or animals - responsible for these attacks. We're advising residents living on the northern outskirts to remain vigilant and stay inside after dusk until the situation is resolved." the sergeant said, and the image switched back to the newsreader. Dean frowned and pressed the 'mute' button as she started a story about Williamsport's road salt budget.

"I wonder how many more people it killed last night that they haven't found yet?" I wondered out loud. In the cold hard light of day, when a giant supernatural wolf wasn't staring at me, I couldn't help thinking we should have tried to do more. Dean heard it in my voice and sighed wearily.

"Sam, you said it yourself - if we'd run into that thing again, we'd be dead. It would've done to us what it did to Patrick Danville, and then we'd be no help to anyone."

I let out a sigh of my own. "Yeah, but it just feels wrong to run, you know? I mean, we're usually running headlong _into _harm's way." I knew he was right, though.

That got a sardonic little chuckle from Dean. "Well, we've usually got a weapon of some sort. You know, one that actually _works_."

"Yeah." I agreed, a small smile touching my mouth. It soon disappeared when I paused to think about that. "What kind of werewolf is immune to silver, Dean?"

"Don't know, Sammy." he replied, quietly. Obviously, he'd also been considering that rather sticky question. "There's nothing about it in Dad's journal, and I've never heard of a werewolf that actually _looks_ like a wolf. Hopefully Bobby turns up something, because we can't let this thing run around killing a pile of people every month." he drained the last of his coffee and got up to refill the mug.

Even from my bed halfway across the room, I could see his eyes were bloodshot and there were dark circles under them. I got the distinct impression Dean had gotten very little sleep last night - even less than me. But I knew pressing him to talk about it was only going to end in a fight, and in my sleep-deprived state I just didn't have the energy for that.

So, as per usual, I got up and took the coffee Dean offered me, sat with him at the kitchen table and ignored the Hellhound-shaped elephant in the room.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

As it turned out, it took Bobby till almost sundown to get back to us. When he finally called, Dean had almost our entire arsenal spread out over both our beds and was wordlessly inspecting and cleaning every single weapon. He knew they didn't actually need cleaning - he'd done it only a couple of weeks ago while we were languishing at Bobby's - but he needed something to take his mind off the werewolf and the obvious Hellhound parallels.

I couldn't blame him, really, because when my Blackberry sprang to life I was sitting at the kitchen table keeping busy by researching obscure werewolf lore. I wasn't finding much, or even looking all that hard, but it kept my mind off Patrick Danville being eaten alive right in front of me.

Dean came to join me at the table as I pressed the speakerphone button. "Hi, Bobby. Did you find anything?" I asked, eyes on Dean. My brother looked back, a tired and troubled expression on his face that I'm sure was a mirror of my own.

_"Well, there's good news and bad news."_

Dean's ears pricked up at the mention of good news. "I could do with some good news. Hit me." he replied, wiping his hands on a towel as he sat down. Suddenly, all I could smell was gun oil.

_"Good news: I know what it is. Boys, you're hunting a loup-garou."_ Bobby said, and neither Dean or I spoke for a few seconds while we thought that over. I raised my eyebrows at Dean, who shrugged and looked back at me with an expression that said he had no clue what Bobby was talking about either.

"What's a loup-garou?" I asked, finally. There was a satisfied snort of laughter from the other end of the phone, and I got the impression Bobby had been expecting us to say that.

_"The amount of research I had to do to find out what that thing is, I deserve a Pulitzer!"_ There was mirth in his voice but it sounded more gravelly than usual, like he'd been up since I called last night. "And we're _very_ grateful." Dean assured Bobby, rolling his eyes. "So, what is it?" he continued, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.

Bobby paused before he answered, and when he did his tone was more serious. _"A loup-garou is basically an über-werewolf. They make regular werewolves look like puppies."_ He said the word with a French accent and a silent 'p', so it sounded like '_lu garu_'.

"Yeah, Bobby, you don't have to tell us - we've seen this thing." I shivered.

_"I don't think you boys quite grasp what you're dealing with here."_ Bobby said grimly. _"The first real description we got of one is from France, round about the time Louis XVI lost his head, and they're more vicious than any other werewolf you've ever come across."_

"So why haven't we heard of one before now if they're so terrible? Usually, the worse the monster the more stuff people write about it." Dean asked, picking at a loose thread on his towel.

_"We don't have a lot of lore about them because loup-garou are _rare_. The condition isn't transmitted by a bite - they have to be cursed individually by a witch. It takes a powerful one to do it though, and even then they generally don't."_

"Why?" I asked, furrowing my brow. This loup-garou lore wasn't exactly filling me with confidence.

_"You know werewolves go after people they have grudges against, right? Well, werewolves are the loup-garou's baby cousins and that trait runs in the family. When they start wolfing out around the full moon, they tend to go straight for the witch that cursed them."_ He didn't need to tell us how that usually ended - we had a _real _good handle on that already.

"All right. So how rare is rare?" Dean leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He looked about as enthusiastic as I felt.

_"Only half a dozen or so have been recorded, mostly in France and Europe. There was one in Quebec in the 1930s - hunters killed it pretty quick, so it only got a couple of dozen people, but it took most of them down with it. There's never been one in the United States before."_ Bobby answered matter-of-factly, and Dean and I exchanged a silent look. He was obviously thinking the same thing I was: _Only a couple of dozen?_

Bobby went on without waiting for a reply. _"Loup-garou change on three nights every month - the two nights before the full moon and the night of - but they turn into actual, giant wolves and that sends all the other toothy critters running for the hills. Bears, mountain lions, real wolves, etcetera - all of them get the hell away as soon as a loup-garou arrives in the area."_

Dean looked up at me, a thoughtful expression on his face. "The ME said there were no mountain lions or big carnivores around here that could've done that kind of damage." he pointed out, and I nodded. "Makes sense. Loup-garou moves in, all the other predators bail town." I know _my_ first instinct was to get the hell out of the loup-garou's immediate vicinity, and obviously the local predators thought the same thing.

"So how do we kill it?" Dean asked, directing his question at my Blackberry. There was a short pause on Bobby's end.

_"That'd be the bad news. I don't know."_

"Oh, that's perfect." Dean groaned, managing to make it sound sarcastic.

_"Dean, there's a lot of conjecture and myth, but no-one knows anything for sure."_ Bobby didn't sound the least bit amused by my brother's sarcasm. "Oh, I _know_ something all right - silver bullets don't work." Dean grumbled, but Bobby ignored him.

_"As far as I can tell, there's one guy that might be able to help - his daddy killed the loup-garou in Quebec. He was only a young boy at the time, but he's the best lead we've got. Thing is, he doesn't have a phone, so you're gonna have to go see him."_ Bobby's tone suggested we probably weren't going to like what he had to say next.

"Okay, I'll bite." Dean took a breath before he went on. "Where are we going?"

_"He lives in a log cabin near Lac á Loup, about 120 miles northeast of Ottawa."_

Dean blinked a couple of times. "We're gonna have to go and see him in _Quebec_?" he asked in disbelief, while I just smiled. That earned me a questioning look from Dean, who obviously didn't see anything amusing about this 800-mile detour.

"'Wolf Lake', Bobby? Really?" I asked, a little smile still on my lips. It took Dean a few seconds, but he rolled his eyes when he got the joke.

_"Yeah, I know."_ Bobby sounded like he was enjoying the symmetry too. _"Anyway, he lives out in real, honest-to-God wilderness. It's ain't quite the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from his front porch. His name's Alain Johns, and he's the son of Moses Johns - the one that actually put down the loup-garou in the 30s."_

"Looks like we're going to Wolf Lake." I looked at Dean, who pursed his lips. I figured he was probably thinking about the fuel bill for this side-trip.

_"One last thing - Sam, don't let your brother do too much of the talking. This guy's a cantankerous old coot, and Dean's exactly the type he's likely to take a dislike to. He doesn't get a lot of visitors, and he's been known to shoot ones he doesn't like."_ Bobby warned.

"We cope with you and Rufus. How bad can he be?" Dean asked, winking at me.

_"This guy lacks our charming nature and pleasant disposition. Don't piss him off."_

"Thanks, Bobby. We'll let you know what we find out." I hung up the phone before Dean could make another smartass comment, and sat back in my chair with a sigh.

"Well, Sammy, there's one good thing about having to go to Canada." Dean said, after a short silence. "And what's that?" I asked, wearily. I knew Dean's sudden cheeky, upbeat attitude was a coping strategy for the raw terror the loup-garou inspired in him, but I let it go. I wasn't about to antagonise him just before we started an 800-mile road trip. I may be crazy, but I'm not insane.

"Canadian bacon." Dean grinned. I rolled my eyes, but he went on smiling as he returned to the collection of weapons on the beds. The stainless steel Taurus sat ready on the nightstand, still loaded with (basically useless) silver rounds, right next to the salt gun. Even when we were cleaning our entire arsenal, there was always at least one gun kept close to hand and ready for action.

"So when are we going?" I asked, closing all the tabs in my browser. None of them had anything on loup-garou, so I was going to have to start the search from scratch again. "I'm thinking tomorrow morning. We're already paying for tonight, and I have to put all this stuff back together and back in the trunk. Plus, I'm sure there's some research you wanna do." Dean replied, picking up the revolver he'd been oiling. He didn't even have to look at the screen to know that's what I was doing.

"Dean, the only real lore on this thing comes from the late 18th century. There's probably not much to _find_." I warned him, but entered the search string anyway. "We're going to get heaps more from this guy in Quebec." I added, frowning at the results that came up. The actual lore results were interspersed with references to a Willy DeVille album inconveniently titled _Loup Garou_.

"No arguments here." Dean looked at me, an amused little smile on his face. "I can't believe you know when Louis the sixth died." he chuckled, looking back down at the revolver.

"It was Louis the six_teenth_, Dean, and he was beheaded. In 1792."

"You're such a nerd."

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

We left early the next morning and drove all day. I spent most of it going over all kinds of lore I'd found on loup-garou, but my lack of sleep finally caught up with me in the middle of the afternoon and the next thing I knew I was waking up in northern New York State - Alexandria, to be exact - and it was already dark.

I woke up with my head resting against the Impala's side window, as Dean got back in the driver's seat and shut his door. He grinned and tossed me something warm and soft in a paper bag. "Nice to see you're back among the living. You were _out_, dude - even Metallica didn't wake you." he folded back the paper on his own warm and soft something, and I finally woke up enough to realise we were parked in a service station.

I peeled back the rapidly-disintegrating paper from whatever Dean had given me, but wrinkled my nose when I got the package open. I figured it was supposed to be food, but it was doing a _very_ poor imitation. I was starving, though, so I held my breath and bit into what the paper bag proclaimed to be a 'premium chicken burger'. You know, false advertising like that should be illegal.

By the time I'd choked down half the alleged chicken burger, Dean had finished his and thrown the bag into the backseat, along with the receipt for our latest tank of gas. "The fuel bill on this hunt is ridiculous, Sam. It should be tax-deductible or something." he told me, turning the key and bringing the Impala roaring back to life.

Even after the awful burger, that made me smile. "We don't pay taxes, Dean." I pointed out with a smile, and he looked at me witheringly. I understood what he meant, though - this hunt was taking us most of the way across the continental US and back again, and even he couldn't deny the Impala was _thirsty_.

"So do you have any idea how we're going to get _into_ Canada?" I changed the subject as we rolled out of the service station. "I mean, we can't exactly go through a checkpoint - what if they wanna look in the trunk?" I went on, but Dean just smiled.

"Don't worry, Sammy, I've got a plan." he assured me. "I'm not going to risk border guards touching you, baby." he patted the Impala's dash with his right hand, and I sighed. Dean's plans could be questionable at the best of times, and he evidently noticed my lack of enthusiasm.

"Honestly, it's fine - we're going to be able to drive right in. You don't spend your life driving around the continental US without picking up a few tricks." Dean was obviously confident, and I didn't doubt he knew a sneaky back door across the border. I just hoped the US and Canadian border patrols didn't know about it too.

"So have you learned anything?" he nodded at the mess of papers on my lap, doing a little subject-changing of his own. There were even more papers stacked next to me, and still more spread across the back seat.

I stretched as I considered the question. The Impala really wasn't designed for sleeping, and I was incredibly stiff. "A few things, I think. I spent today trying to sort fact from fiction - three days ago I would've said most of it was ridiculous, but now I think we have to be a lot more open-minded." I said, sifting through the small pile of paper on the seat between Dean and I until I found my notebook. I flipped it open to somewhere around the middle, and flicked a couple of pages further till I found what I was looking for.

"So, the name 'loup-garou' is French, coined by the guy that described the one in the 18th century - you know, before it tore him to shreds." I started, and Dean arched an eyebrow at me. "The monk who wrote the account of the French loup-garou got eaten before he was done writing. Apparently his manuscript 'swam with his lifeblood'." I explained, and Dean wrinkled his nose. Neither of us had any trouble believing that.

"Anyway, the _loup_ part means 'wolf', and _garou_ comes from the Old French word _garoul_, which means 'werewolf'. Basically, 'loup-garou' literally means 'wolf-werewolf'." I continued, and Dean sighed. "A wolf among werewolves. Awesome." he flicked on the indicator and turned onto the almost-deserted highway, then immediately planted his foot on the accelerator. The engine roared and the Impala shot off down the road at some ridiculous speed, and when I looked over at Dean he had a satisfied little smile on his face. There are few things he enjoys more than opening up the throttle on a quiet road - it's really no wonder we're constantly stopping for fuel.

I shook my head and continued. "And I've got more good news. Apparently they're basically indestructible, even in their human form." I said, and that immediately got Dean's attention. "So even if we _could_ find the guy before the next full moon, shooting him still wouldn't help?" he turned towards me to make sure I wasn't having him on, the little smile gone. He didn't lift off the accelerator, though.

"That's what the lore says." I shrugged. Unfortunately, I wasn't joking. "You know, Sam, I really don't like this thing." Dean said flatly, looking back out at the road. "You and me both." I agreed. As far as bad hunts went, this one was getting up there.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

True to his word, Dean did in fact know a sneaky back way into Canada. We crossed the border via a rickety old bridge just before 11pm, in the middle of nowhere and without a border guard in sight, then stopped for a surprisingly decent night's sleep at the first motel we saw. My bed wasn't bad, as motel beds go, but I could probably have slept just as deeply on the floor. My Impala-nap hadn't really done anything to recharge my batteries and it was heaven to have an actual pillow instead of a rolled-up jacket or the passenger-side window.

Dean and I were up early (again) the next morning, and we grabbed breakfast at a local diner before we got back on the road. The place was comfortable and homey, and most importantly, well-heated - there was three inches of snow on the ground outside, and if you stayed out in anything less than full winter gear the cold quickly seeped into your very bones. I found myself wishing for the relative warmth of Pennsylvania.

I had my customary short stack, with real Canadian maple syrup. God, that stuff's _good_; if they'd let me, I could have drained a glass of it. Dean didn't know what he was missing - predictably, most of his breakfast consisted of his beloved Canadian bacon. It's like catnip to my brother: he hardly stopped eating long enough to drink his coffee.

The bacon probably had something to do with the sunny mood he was in as we hit the road again and headed for Lac á Loup. It seemed that the further we got from Pennsylvania - and thus the loup-garou - the cheerier Dean got. The lack of dark circles under his eyes and the fact that they weren't bloodshot told me he'd finally had his first decent night's sleep since we came face-to-face with the loup-garou.

As we pulled out of the diner carpark, Dean put the _Led Zeppelin IV_ cassette in, cranked up the volume, and was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as we headed out of town. I didn't want to spoil his good mood, so once again I kept my mouth shut about loup-garou and Hellhounds and started reading a book instead. I was barely one page into it when Dean started singing along - it didn't seem to bother him that the song was _Black Dog_.

We drove on to Ottawa, then continued north. About 100 miles northeast of Ottawa we hit the town of Sainte-Veronique, by which time the roads were pretty rough and the terrain could best be described as 'mountainous'. We passed through Sainte-Veronique just after 2:30pm, after that the journey got downright treacherous.

We found ourselves on a small, winding road disappearing into a snowy forest that looked like it had been transplanted direct from Transylvania. I played navigator, guiding Dean down various rabbit-tracks snaking through the trees that could barely even be called roads. I tried not to think about the fact that if it rained - or if the few inches of snow got any deeper - the Impala wasn't going to be able to cope. It wasn't like we could turn back, anyway - we _had_ to see Alain Johns. A whole heap of lives (ours among them) literally depended on it.

Almost seven hours after we finished breakfast (and after having gone through most of Led Zeppelin's discography), the Impala rolled up unharmed in front of an ancient-looking log cabin on the shores of Lac á Loup, Quebec. The building stood in a clearing on the edge of the forest, facing the icy grey lake and with snow-dusted, tree-covered hills rolling away at its back. The cabin had a sharply-pitched gable roof from which a smoking brick chimney stuck out into the sky, and a porch ran across the front with a small garden bed between it and the compacted gravel driveway where we'd parked.

"Cheery looking place." Dean observed, switching off the engine and taking a look around through the windows. In what little anaemic sunlight made it through the cloud cover, the cabin had a tinge of wintry Gothic horror about it; like it might have been Dracula's groundskeeper's cottage or something. The place felt very isolated, and it was kind of unsettling - suddenly I didn't particularly feel like getting out of the nice, warm car.

I did, though, and as soon as I opened the door I was assaulted by that Arctic wind that had been the bane of our existence since we'd arrived in Pennsylvania. Only it was worse up here. I gritted my teeth and stepped out onto the icy gravel as Dean did the same, a similar expression of distaste on his face as he zipped up his jacket against the cold. I took another look around the pale, snowy landscape and it did nothing to lessen my vague sense of foreboding. The place was just _creepy_.

Some of the creepiness came from that fact that, apart from the forest, there wasn't much in the way of vegetation in the clearing around the cabin. Some hardy wild species from the surrounding woods had colonised the garden bed, but most of the space in it was taken up by an unidentifiable herb-like plant with long upright stems and green leaves that were shaped like miniature palm leaves. The stems had mostly died off and collapsed to ground level under the weight of the snow, but in the spring when the plant started growing again, they would be at least up to my waist. All in all, the place looked rather bare and inhospitable.

"Coming?" Dean was standing halfway between the car and the cabin now - I'd been too busy looking at the landscape to notice he'd started walking. I took a few jogging steps to catch up, and fell into step beside him as we walked towards the stairs leading up onto the porch. The steps were rough-hewn slabs of timber, and the handrails looked like unfinished branches that had been cut from a tree in the forest nearby.

"This place is creepy, huh?" Dean said, looking around the barren, snowy clearing with a little shudder. The disconcerting nature of the place hadn't escaped him. "Feels like a scene straight out of _Dracula_." I agreed, as we started up the steps. As we went up to the front door, I was surprised to see a silver knocker (in the shape of a wolf's head), and the edge of black devil's trap poking out from under the rough coir doormat. I looked over at Dean silently, eyebrows raised. _Is this guy a hunter?_ Dean looked back with a little frown and shrugged a shoulder. _I didn't think so..._

He reached out and rapped three times on the door with the silver knocker, and we stood back and waited. And waited. I was starting to wonder if the guy was even home and Dean was reaching for the knocker again when we heard muffled footsteps on the other side of the door. No less than three locks clicked before the door swung open to reveal a stocky old man with a weathered face and longish silver hair pulled back into a ponytail. I took a sharp breath and my eyes widened as I saw the ancient-looking bolt action rifle grasped in his steady hands - it was pointed straight at my midsection.

"Hello, sir. Are you Alain Johns?" I asked in the most polite tone I could muster, trying not to stare at the rifle and keeping my hands where the old man could see them. Dean stood stock still beside me, hands also in plain view at his sides and well away from the pistol inside his jacket. Fortunately for me, it looked like he wasn't going to risk going for his gun and getting his little brother shot.

"Who's askin'?" the man peered at Dean and I suspiciously from behind his glasses with faded blue eyes, discreetly but intently watching our hands. The guy might have been old, but he was still razor sharp and I got the distinct impression that if we gave him a reason, he'd shoot us both dead faster than either of us could draw our concealed weapons. Bobby hadn't been kidding when he'd warned us not to piss this guy off, and it never ceases to amaze me how a day can go from relatively pleasant to life-threatening in the space of a couple of minutes.

"I'm Sam Winchester, and this is my brother Dean. We're on a hunt down in Pennsylvania, and Bobby Singer told us you might have some information that could help." I told him, and the old man's eyes narrowed at the mention of Pennsylvania. He considered his reply for a painfully long minute before he spoke again - his accent wasn't as French as I expected. More like how you might expect John Wayne to sound after he'd lived among the French Canadians for a few years.

"Thought someone might come 'round asking questions. Come in." Mr. Johns lowered the gun, then turned away and walked back into the shadows of the cabin. Dean and I exchanged a look before we followed him inside and closed the door. Each of the three deadbolts locked behind us with a very solid _click_.

The cabin was on the small side, lit only by what weak sunlight made it through the small windows, and sparsely furnished with what looked like handmade pieces. The floor was bare boards and the bare log walls were dotted with photographs, many of them black and white - they looked like they'd been taken around the lake, and the people in them were wearing what I thought was Depression-era clothing.

We rounded a corner into what was apparently the living room, where we found the fireplace responsible for the smoking chimney. The whole place smelled of pipe tobacco and wood smoke, and throughout the cabin bunches of a dried herbaceous plant with dark blue-purple flowers, now faded to a dusty pale violet, hung from rafters and doorknobs on coarse brown twine. Alain sat heavily in a comfortable looking armchair, and Dean and I sat on the soft couch opposite.

"You're here about the thing in Pennsylvania?" he asked, regarding us sombrely. "That's right." I replied, and Alain sighed. "Tracked it from Maine, through Massachusetts and Connecticut?" he went on, and I nodded. Obviously, he knew exactly why we were here.

"So you know what it is yet?" the old man asked. "At first, we thought it was a werewolf - until we saw it on the last full moon. It's not like any werewolf we've ever seen before, and silver bullets to the heart didn't kill it. Bobby did some digging for us, and now we know it's a loup-garou." I told him, and Alain pressed his lips together.

"And he sent you here to talk to me because nobody else knows anything." he said, but his tone implied he already knew the answer. "He said your father killed a loup-garou in the 1930s?" I asked, and he nodded. "Thirty-four, 'twas." he replied, sagely, looking from me to Dean and back again. "Brought it down with a silver bullet to the heart." he went on, and Dean let out a snort of derision. As per Bobby's warning he hadn't said a word, but now he just couldn't help himself. "I tried that. I emptied a full clip of silver bullets into it, and it didn't even slow down!"

I discreetly stood on my brother's foot, trying to get him to shut up, which earned me a glare. "Let me finish, boy." Alain looked at Dean with narrowed eyes as he spoke, peering over the top of his glasses. Fortunately, he hadn't brought the rifle into the living room with him. "These monsters are only vulnerable when they've been exposed to wolfsbane - you have to poison it, _then_ shoot it." he told Dean tersely. The word 'wolfsbane' set a little bell ringing in the back of my mind, but it took me a few seconds to work out why.

Suddenly, it dawned on me. "That's what all those bunches of flowers are, right?" I pointed at the bouquet hanging in the doorway, and Alain lost his sour expression as he focused back me. I saw Dean give me a look out of the corner of my eye, but I ignored him.

"Wolfsbane grows wild around the lake. I cut it in the summer and keep it all year." the old man replied. "Looks like we're going to need some." I said, and Alain nodded. "I've got plenty. You boys want the root - that's where the poison is."

"Okay, so we have to poison it and then shoot it. Now, how are we going to _find_ it?" Dean asked, and Alain laughed. It was more of a cackle, really. "Oh, you won't _need_ to find it." he told us, a grim little smile on his lips. "Why's that?" I asked, and he chuckled again. "It'll find _you_. You shot it, and it'll want payback." he explained, a sparkle in his eye, and Dean got that sceptical look on his face again. "How the hell do you know that?" he demanded, before I could remind him not to piss off our only source of information on the loup-garou. Sometimes, I think I should make him wait in the car.

Alain paused before he responded. "I know, 'cause it did the same thing in the 30s. Damn thing hunted down everyone that tried to kill it, and that's why they eventually took it down all the way out here. You see, the loup-garou started off just north of Ottawa in 1933." he said, all the humour gone from his voice. His expression became remote as he remembered.

"Ottawa's a hundred miles from here." Dean pointed out, furrowing his brow. "So it is. After the first full moon, when they realised what it was, my father and a group of others hunted it for the next two months. By the end of its third full moon, nine of the thirteen men in the posse were dead. Hunted down and killed in their houses." Alain continued, and I shivered. I knew a little something about lying awake in the dark, wondering if the monster was going to come through the window and tear you apart. Next to me, Dean shuddered as well.

"So, before the fourth full moon, the four that were left ran and tried to get their families away from the beast. We travelled for days through snow inches deep, but it found us here on the night of the fourth full moon. A friend of my father's took wolfsbane to kill himself when we realised it had found us, but he wasn't quite dead before it tore him up." Alain's voice was quieter now, and his eyes had that unfocused look people get when they're replaying memories in their head.

"That's how it took in the poison." I breathed, and Alain nodded. "Then my father shot it through the heart with a silver bullet, and it was dead before it hit the ground. They burned it where it fell." Alain had a haunted look in his face as he spoke, and it reminded me very much of the look Dean had the night we saw the loup-garou.

"Is that why place is called Wolf Lake?" Dean asked, an unreadable expression on his face. I knew there must be a helluva lot going on inside his head right then, but he was covering it well. After all, he'd had practice.

"My father named it. He built this cabin with his bare hands, and the surviving posse members built houses of their own nearby. This is the only one left." Alain looked wistfully out the window, and I understood why - the people in his black and white photos were evidently the other families that ran from the loup-garou.

After a short pause, Alain got up out of his chair. "I've got some wolfsbane root stored in the freezer." He went through a door on the other side of the room, and I saw a flash of kitchen cupboards before the door swung shut behind him. "Holy crap." Dean whistled under his breath, as soon as the old man was out of earshot. "We've gotta get this thing the next time it turns, Dean. If we don't, it'll get us first." I whispered back, and he frowned. "Incentive, I guess." he sighed, as Alain came back into the room with out wolfsbane root.

Our visit to Wolf Lake was the end of Dean's good mood. The Led Zeppelin cassette in the tape deck was replaced by Motörhead on the twilight drive back to Sainte-Veronique, and he barely said two words to me until we were sitting in our newly-rented motel room.

I was sitting at the kitchen table checking out the lore on wolfsbane when Dean came over to stand behind me. He held a zip-lock plastic bag containing the frozen root, and was absently turning it over and over in his hands. It looked kind of like a small turnip. "So what's so special about wolfsbane?" he asked, suddenly.

"The root is poisonous - like, seriously poisonous. There's a neurotoxin in it that can kill you almost instantly. It slows your heart rate, drops your blood pressure, paralyses your respiratory muscles - nasty stuff. The ancient Romans used it to carry out death sentences on criminals." I replied, and looked over my shoulder at Dean. That tense, strained look was back, and I was betting it would be joined by red eyes with dark circles tomorrow morning.

"Why does it work on loup-garou?"

"No clue." I replied honestly, after a short pause.

"So all we have is this guy's say-so?" The tension was showing in Dean's voice now.

"His father _did _kill the last one, Dean." I reminded him delicately, and I heard him heave a sigh.

"Well I'm gonna feel a helluva lot better going up against this thing with a freaking _plant_ once we get some confirmation."

I had to admit, that'd make me feel a helluva lot better too. What happened to Patrick Danville at the metaphorical hands of this beast still sent shivers down my spine, and I wanted to be damn sure the wolfsbane was going to work before we squared off with the loup-garou again. And there was only one place I knew we could get confirmation on the lore.

"Guess we should call Bobby and let him know." I pulled out my Blackberry and dialled Bobby's number. I put it on speaker, and he answered on the third ring.

_"So how'd it go?"_ he asked, not even bothering to say hello.

"Well, he didn't shoot us, despite Dean's best efforts. And we got something." I replied, as Dean sat in the chair next to mine and put the root on the table. "Silver bullets by themselves won't kill it. We have to poison it with wolfsbane, _then_ shoot it in the heart." I continued, and there was a pause on the other end of the line while Bobby thought that over.

_"Wolfsbane, huh?"_ he mused, and paused again. _"You know, that actually makes sense."_

"It does?" Dean and I asked simultaneously, looking at each other with identical expressions of confusion.

_"Well, I've been doing a little more research, and I found a record of the actual curse."_ I heard shuffling paper as he looked through what I imagined were small skyscrapers of books and papers on his desk. A good half a minute later he evidently found what he was looking for.

_"Wolfsbane is one of the ingredients in the spell the witch uses to curse whatever poor bastard pissed them off. They use it in the part that creates the thing's supernatural shield against all the stuff that would kill a normal werewolf - makes sense it can bring the shield back down, too."_

Dean raised his eyebrows at me. _What do you think?_ I shrugged in reply. That theory made about as much sense as anything else on this case. "Okay. We can go with that." he told Bobby, after a short pause.

"Right. So, how do we get the poison into the loup-garou?" I posed the question I'd been pondering since Alain told us about the wolfsbane.

_"I'm sure I can come up with something."_ Bobby sounded like he already had the beginnings of a plan. Good thing, too, because I was fresh out of ideas - and judging from the relieved look on Dean's face, so was he.

"Looks like we're coming to see you again." Dean sighed, sitting back in his chair.

_"Hey, it's going to take you a few days to get here - get a cooler and some ice and keep the wolfsbane root cold, okay? And don't dawdle - the fresher it is the better."_

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

_Sioux Falls, South Dakota  
>Four days later<em>

Dean and I were both having a bad day when we finally got back to Bobby's. We were pretty crabby after basically driving from one side of the continent to the other, sleeping in the car the whole way in an effort to get the root to Bobby as fast as possible. The Impala had hardly stopped moving since we left Sainte-Veronique.

It wasn't just the endless driving and sleeping in the Impala, though. On our way back through Ohio, I'd finally bitten the bullet and pointed out to Dean the obvious similarities between the loup-garou and a Hellhound. And yeah, it went about as well as you're imagining it did.

Remember when I said I expected Dean to start losing sleep again after we saw Alain at Lac á Loup? Well, I was right. From what I could tell, he was back to getting two or three hours a night, and he looked like death warmed over - bloodshot eyes with ever-deepening dark circles beneath them, which stood out against his pallid skin.

When he _did_ sleep he had nightmares, and usually woke up screaming if I didn't wake him before it got that far. So, in an effort to sleep as little as possible, Dean had been popping caffeine pills like Tic-Tacs. He was dog-tired and his temper had a hair trigger, and after two days of walking on eggshells I couldn't take it any more. It didn't help that I was down to the last of my clean clothes, which included my white/black pair of odd socks.

We were about 80 miles into Ohio when Dean made the latest in a line of risky moves and blew past a sedan doing the speed limit on the I-90. In my mirror, I could see the startled expression on the driver's face as the Impala roared past him at close to 100 miles an hour.

"You've gotta slow down, Dean - you're going to get us killed!" The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself, and I saw his jaw muscles working as he ground his teeth. "I know what I'm doing, Sam." he growled, and glared back out at the road.

"No, you don't." I said, after a short pause to consider whether I really wanted to poke this particular bear. Dean looked over at me again, daring me to continue. His glassy, red-rimmed eyes convinced me I had to.

"I know why you're not sleeping, Dean." I told him, and he let out a snort of derision. "Oh you do, do you?" The corner of his mouth twitched in a mocking little smile. "I noticed the similarities between this loup-garou and a Hellhound too. It's hard not to." I went on, and Dean didn't reply. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tight his knuckles went white and he bit his bottom lip as he stared intently out at the road. I was definitely on the right track.

"We're hunting something that reminds you of the demonic pit-bull that dragged you to Hell, Dean. Nobody expects you to be okay with that." I said, but still got nothing. I shifted in my seat to face him. "You can't keep going like this. Just _talk_ to me."

"You can't understand." Dean said, voice dangerously quiet, eyes still fixed on the road and knuckles still white as he gripped the wheel like his life depended on it. And at this speed, it did.

"So _tell _me." I replied, and Dean's lips pressed together into a thin line. "I _can't_, all right?" he snapped, taking his eyes off the road to throw me a look that would melt steel. Had I been able to, I might've taken an involuntary step back. "Talking won't make me forget being torn to shreds, so for the love of God, _shut up_ _about it_!" He set his jaw and stared back out at the road in front of us. I stayed quiet after that, and Dean didn't say another word to me until we were halfway across Indiana.

So now you can probably understand why, when we eventually pulled up in front of Bobby's house the following evening, Dean and I were having an impressive yelling match. This particular argument was about how to administer the wolfsbane to the loup-garou, and we were so involved in it that we didn't notice Bobby come out onto the porch. He didn't say anything; he just leaned against a wooden post with his arms folded and watched the show.

"Are we gonna hide the root in a piece of cheese and try and _fool _the loup-garou into eating it?" Dean demanded sarcastically, getting out and almost slamming the driver's side door. He stalked back to the trunk and yanked it open, then started throwing our bags out onto the driveway.

"If you put it in your hand and hold it out in front of the thing, I'm sure that'll have the same effect!" I shot back, and earned myself a glare from Dean as I slammed my own door. He _hated_ people slamming his baby's doors, and that was exactly why I did it.

"You gonna wait for a written invitation to shoot next time as well? Maybe wait until it gets close enough to lick your friggin' _cheek_?" Dean slammed the lid of the trunk, staring daggers at me across the Impala's roof.

"You were doing enough shooting for the both of us, Dean. Sounded like panic fire to me." The words came out harsher than I intended, and he narrowed his eyes. He didn't reply, he just glared - I actually wondered for a second if he was going to come around the car and take a swing at me. I would've deserved it, too - I already felt terrible about using Dean's Hellhound-inspired fear against him like that.

Our little stand-off was interrupted by Bobby's voice floating down from the porch. "You boys done now? 'Cause I actually know how we're gonna do it."

That got our attention. Dean and I looked up at the porch, but Bobby had already turned his back on us and gone inside. We grabbed our bags and followed wordlessly, anger still simmering.

When we got into the house, we found Bobby in the kitchen. On the table he'd set out a knife and chopping board, a glass jar with a screw cap, an old whiskey bottle half-full of an anonymous clear liquid, and a box of latex gloves. He stood next to it, arms still folded, regarding Dean and I with an unreadable expression and I suddenly felt like a kid that had been called to the principal's office. I noticed Dean shift uneasily next to me, evidently feeling exactly the same way.

"So are you done with your little domestic, then?" Bobby asked evenly, looking from me to Dean. "Sorry, Bobby - it's been a long week." I said apologetically, by way of explanation. "Uh huh." he frowned slightly as his eyes settled on Dean. "Christ, boy, you look like death warmed up." Bobby immediately noticed the dark circles under Dean's bloodshot eyes and the general pallor of his skin.

Dean sighed, evidently sick of being told he looked like hell, but didn't bite Bobby's head off like he'd done to me in Ohio. I think maybe he was too tired. "You said you knew how we were going to poison the loup-garou?" He avoided looking directly at me or Bobby as he immediately changed the subject. I pressed my lips together and stared at the roof, willing myself to keep my mouth shut and not revive the whole Hellhound argument.

"I got a plan, yeah." Bobby said slowly, studying Dean and I as he spoke. He was obviously dying to know what the hell was going on that would put us at each other's throats like this, but he refrained from asking the question. "We're going to make aconitine darts."

Dean and I had simultaneous, if very different, reactions to that statement. "We're going to _what_?" Dean asked, looking at Bobby like he was speaking Greek, at the exact same time I exclaimed "That's genius!" Dean looked at me, then at Bobby, and the expression on his face suggested he thought we were both out of our minds.

"Aconitine is the technical name for the poison in the wolfsbane root." I told Dean, then looked at the stuff laid out on the kitchen table and up to Bobby. "We're going to make an aconitine solution, right?" I continued, and he nodded. "Yep. We put the root in a jar full of solvent that dissolves out the aconitine, we load up some tranquiliser darts with the mixture, shoot the loup-garou with those, then hit it with the silver bullets." he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"Oh, well, when you say it like that...!" Dean rolled his eyes. He obviously disagreed. "Bobby, this thing could kill us before we get a shot off with one gun, and you want us to use _two_?"

"Better give it half a minute to work, too."

"Well that's even better." Dean glared at Bobby, who looked back mildly.

Honestly, I kind of agreed with Dean - his argument wasn't an unreasonable one. Each extra second the loup-garou was alive would exponentially increase our chances of dying a violent, bloody death. I decided not to fan the flames, though. "How long does it take to brew?" I asked, and Bobby shrugged a shoulder. "The longer we leave it the stronger it gets."

"Well, we've got just under three weeks till the next full moon. While it's brewing, we should work out how the hell we're going to do this without getting ourselves torn to ribbons." I said, and Dean looked incredulously from me to Bobby. He obviously still thought we were insane. "Well, while you guys play chemist, I'm going to take a shower." He'd evidently decided not to make an argument out of it though, and headed upstairs to wash up.

Bobby watched him go, and waited till he was out of earshot before he spoke. "What's with your brother?" he asked, as we sat down at the table. There's a can of worms if ever there was one.

"He won't talk about it, but I know what's going on. The wolf reminds Dean of the Hellhound that came for him when his deal was due." I told him, and Bobby quirked an eyebrow. "You think?"

"Definitely. Calling this thing a 'demonic pit-bull' wouldn't be an exaggeration." I sat back in my chair with a sigh. "But honestly, even the Hellhound didn't do damage like this loup-garou. At least Dean didn't get eaten alive." The absurdity of what I was saying struck me even as the words were coming out of my mouth. On this hunt, the best case scenario involved simply avoiding getting eaten alive. Sometimes, I think I need to find another job.

"He still has nightmares about being a Hellhound's chew toy, and that night in Williamsport he came face-to-face with something that could easily do the same thing. It shook him up, but he got better on the drive to Quebec - the further we got from Pennsylvania, the cheerier he got. He only came crashing back down after we talked to Alain Johns, and he's been this way ever since." I finished, and Bobby was silent for half a minute as he thought that over. Then he asked the $64,000 question. "Is he gonna be able to face it when the next full moon rolls around?"

I didn't hesitate before I answered. "This is Dean, Bobby. He can do it." I was sure of that - no matter how much the Hellhound-lookalike terrified him, Dean would do what needed to be done. Good thing, too, because chances were our lives depended on it.

"Well, all right then." Bobby sighed. He might have had reservations, but he was going to take my word for it. "Guess I'd better get started. Where's this wolfsbane of yours?"

I fished the mostly-frozen root out of the pocket of my bag, and handed it to him. "You've done this before, then?" I picked up the whiskey bottle and started to uncap it, curious about the contents. "You don't wanna do that." Bobby told me, sharply. I stopped just before the lid came off in my hand and looked up at him quizzically.

"That's chloroform." he explained, and I immediately screwed the cap back on and set the bottle back on the table at arm's length. I could smell the sweet scent of the vapours that had escaped the bottle when I loosened the lid. "You should really label that." I told him, and Bobby shrugged. "Never had idjits nosing around it before." he replied pointedly, and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He paused for a second, then added a second pair over the top of the first before he even touched the zip-lock bag.

I watched as he tipped the root out onto the glass chopping board and, with some difficulty, started to cut it into rough slices about 5mm thick. "So why chloroform?" I asked, flinching as a chunk of half-frozen wolfsbane root shot halfway across the table towards me. Bobby picked it up with a double-gloved hand and dropped it into the coffee jar before he replied.

"The poison in the root is an alkaloid, and those are most soluble in chloroform." he replied, jaw clenched as he drove the knife down and carved off another slice. "Isn't alcohol the traditional solvent of choice when hunters are making poison solutions?" I asked, and Bobby added a few more slices to the coffee jar.

"Chloroform's heaps better at dissolving out the aconitine. You wanna use a less efficient solvent, be my guest - there's some moonshine in the kitchen. At least 100 proof." he offered, eyes focused intently on the wolfsbane root in front of him as he cut another slice. As much as I didn't want to accidentally knock myself out with the chloroform, I wanted to get eaten alive even less.

"I think I'd like this solution to be as strong as we can make it." I conceded, after a short pause. "Thought you might." Bobby replied, slicing up the last of the root. He put the slices into the bottom of the coffee jar and then we held our breath as he mostly filled it with chloroform before quickly replacing the lid on both containers. He tightened the lid on the coffee jar and turned it over in his hands a few times, and the wolfsbane slices floated lazily around in the chloroform before settling back on the bottom of the jar.

"So, a couple of weeks from now, we'll have a jar of loup-garou poison." I mused, watching Bobby put the jar on a bookcase away from the fireplace and direct sunlight. "You said something about a tranquiliser gun?" I asked, and Bobby produced what looked like an overgrown air rifle from somewhere in the library. He plonked it down on the table in front of me, and I just looked at it.

I'd never used a tranquiliser gun before - Dad hadn't been big on weapons that fired non-lethal projectiles - and Bobby noticed my wary expression. "Do I have to teach you two how to use this?" he asked, and I frowned. "Well, that depends." I said. "On?" He raised his eyebrows. "Whether you want us to live." I replied simply, and he chuckled. "When your brother gets back down here I'll show the both of you. It's not hard." Bobby told me, and poured us both a cup of coffee while we waited for my brother to grace us with his presence.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

It was the week before the February full moon when we once again left Bobby's for Pennsylvania. Dean and I had stayed for a couple of weeks, fine-tuning our skills with the compressed-air-powered tranquiliser gun (the trajectory on the darts took some getting used to) and learning how to load the darts with the aconitine/chloroform solution for when it was time to go hunting. We also cast dozens more silver bullets from a heap of old jewellery Dean bought cheap at Bobby's friendly neighbourhood pawnbroker - it was more rounds than we were going to need, but it never hurts to be prepared.

I hadn't brought up the loup-garou/Hellhound thing with Dean again. He was determined not to talk about it, so I decided I wasn't going to push. He didn't exactly sleep _well_ at Bobby's, but at least he stopped taking caffeine pills and got more than a couple of hours a night. He was still quiet though, and didn't resort to playing pranks on me even after we'd run out of silver to cast bullets, mastered the tranquiliser gun and worked out a plan to use them both. He slept in a separate room the whole time, so I don't know if he was having nightmares - if I had to guess, though, I'd say he was. I don't know how he couldn't. But he was functioning, so I left well enough alone.

"You boys sure you don't want some help on this one?" Bobby asked, as he followed us out to the Impala. The car wasn't gleaming anymore and it was raining this time, with thunder rumbling in the distance. It was appropriately ominous, I suppose, considering what Dean and I were setting off to hunt.

"Thanks, but we got it." Dean replied, shutting the trunk on our bags and opening his door. "Thanks for the help, Bobby. We owe you one." he added, and Bobby nodded.

"I'm gonna want that gun back." he said, a solemn expression on his face. I got the feeling what he really wanted to say was _Don't get yourselves killed._

"We'll bring it back, Bobby." I replied, from the other side of the car. _Don't worry, we'll be careful._ A little smile temporarily disrupted the troubled look on Bobby's face - he understood what I was trying to say.

"So let's go get this thing." Dean got into the driver's seat and brought the engine to life, waving his hand at me in an impatient 'hurry up' gesture. I got in next to him and we once again left Bobby standing his driveway, watching the tail lights of the Impala disappear in the rain.

* * *

><p>So that's how we came to be in Williamsport's Wildwood Cemetery at night in winter. I had the tranquiliser gun loaded with the wolfsbane darts, and Dean had the stainless steel Taurus packed full of silver rounds he'd cast at Bobby's. It was still freezing cold, but hey: at least it wasn't snowing.<p>

I suppose you're wondering why we were in Williamsport at all, given how the loup-garou moved onto a new city every month. You might call it a calculated risk. At Lac á Loup, Alain had made it pretty clear to us that the loup-garou would hunt us down like it did the posse in the 30s, and after a few days at Bobby's Dean had proposed a plan to use that to our advantage.

Honestly, the plan didn't thrill me. When Dean had sat opposite me at Bobby's kitchen table and suggested I sit in a tree with the poison darts, while he stood below with the silver rounds and played bait, I almost spat out my coffee. But I couldn't come up with a better idea, so we were stuck with this one. No matter how reckless and dangerous it was.

From my perch in the tree, well-hidden amongst the evergreen's needles, I had an unobstructed view of the park-like field of graves sprawling out before us. There were only wisps of cloud in the sky, and the light from the full moon was strong enough to cast deep shadows. Dean was standing below me, gun ready in hand with the safety off, also constantly scanning the graveyard.

"This is a bad idea, Dean." I said, for the umpteenth time since he'd pitched it.

There was an exasperated sigh from below, and I could just imagine the annoyed expression on Dean's face. "You finally got a better one?" he asked simply, and it was my turn to sigh. I didn't.

"What if it _doesn't_ come for us? A heap of innocent people could get killed while we sit here-" I continued, but was interrupted by a drawn-out, bone-chilling howl from the hills above the cemetery.

"Sounds like that's not gonna be a problem." Dean replied drily. His voice was steady, but that howl must've sent his heart rate through the roof - I know it sent mine skyrocketing.

Dean took a deep breath and checked the clip of shiny silver rounds, and patted the two spares in his jeans pockets. "Come on, Cujo - let's get this over with." he muttered as I scanned the trees around us, searching the shadows for any sign of a lurking loup-garou.

"Can you see it?" Dean asked, after a minute. "Nothing yet. I don't suppose we'll get a lot of warning." I said softly, still looking around. "For those of us standing on the ground that's really not helpful, Sam." Dean replied - I could almost hear him grinding his teeth. "I'm looking, Dean, but..." I started, but trailed off as I saw a flash of movement in the trees on the other side of the field of graves. Dean brought the Taurus up, ready.

"What?" he hissed, and the branches around me rustled as I adjusted my position slightly. "Thought I saw something in the trees on the other side of the big angel headstone over there. About two o'clock." I said, my voice hushed. "If it's there, it can probably hear you anyway." Dean observed, peering through the rows of headstones to the stand of trees about 50 yards away. What I'd seen was only really a slightly deeper shadow among the trees, but it was definitely _there_.

"I don't see it." he said, after a few tense seconds. I stayed quiet and released the safety on the tranquiliser gun, watching the shadow move out of the trees. "Behind the graves." I whispered, and Dean looked back out at the headstones.

From my spot in the tree I could see the loup-garou clearly, slinking closer behind a row of gravestones. Holy Christ, that thing was huge. It moved with almost feline grace, its giant paws hardly making a sound in the grass.

"First chance you get, Sam." Dean reminded me quietly, taking a few deep breaths. "I know, Dean." I already had the gun up to my shoulder, looking down the barrel at the loup-garou as I tracked it across the graveyard.

The loup-garou got within 20 yards of Dean before I got a clear shot. The animal paused for a second at a broken headstone, leaving its muscular shoulder open. I immediately squeezed the trigger on the tranquiliser gun, and with a _hiss_ of compressed air the dart quickly covered the 20 yards and lodged deep in the loup-garou's shoulder. The barbs on the needle tip held it fast, and the momentum of the steel ball in the tail of the dart depressed the syringe plunger, delivering the poison directly into the beast's bloodstream.

The loup-garou growled when the dart hit and threw its head around to try and tear the offending item out of its shoulder. It caught the dart between its teeth and ripped it free, the plastic disintegrating in its jaws. Its blue eyes fell on the only human it could see, which was Dean. If it hadn't wanted to kill him before, it sure as hell did now.

The loup-garou closed the distance between itself and Dean faster than I thought possible. Even ready as he was, he didn't have time to properly aim as the monster leapt at him - he got a shot off, but I saw a small puff of red mist as the bullet just grazed the giant wolf's shoulder. It yowled in pain and lashed out with a giant paw.

The swipe caught Dean in the left shoulder. It knocked him through the air and into a tree nearly ten feet away, sending the Taurus flying into the surrounding long grass. He hit the trunk of the tree hard, driving all the breath from his lungs, then sank to the ground with a groan and lay completely still.

From my spot in the tree, I could only watch on in horror as the loup-garou turned the tables on us in only a few seconds. "Dean!" I shouted, scrambling hurriedly down through the branches. As I hit the ground I dropped the tranquiliser gun and pulled out my Beretta, also loaded with silver ammunition, and ran to Dean's side.

"Dean." I breathed, seeing the scarlet blood running from a cut above his left eye. He was still breathing though, and I didn't have time to check any further - there was a growl from behind me, and I turned to see the loup-garou coming again.

Time seemed to slow down as I brought my gun up to the loup-garou's chest. I was in front of Dean, on one knee, and in the split-second it took me to aim I saw the monster in far more detail than I ever wanted to - white teeth gleaming, blue eyes shining murderously, muscles rippling as it ran, and claws tearing ripping into the earth and sending chunks of grass and soil flying out behind it. It got so close I could see the individual whiskers on its muzzle. Then, I pulled the trigger.

I got off as many shots as I could, and I remember thinking that at this point it was probably going to tear my throat out anyway. But if I was going, then I was damn sure going to take the monster with me.

I saw a handful of silver bullets hit it in the chest, accompanied by little puffs of red mist, and I was actually pretty confident I'd hit the heart - right up until the loup-garou hit me like a freight train and sent me crashing back into Dean. It drove all the breath from my body, and I heard something crack against the trunk of the tree before stars exploded in my vision like multicoloured fireworks. I was out like a light before I even really knew what happened.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

When I came to, it was snowing lightly. I was laying on my back looking up at the sky, and as my head cleared it occurred to me that I shouldn't be waking up at all. The last thing I remembered was the loup-garou crashing into me just after I emptied my clip into its chest, and I'd fully expected it to tear my head off.

But obviously I was still alive. I wasn't in Heaven, that's for sure - I was freezing, my back and neck were cramping, and I had a spectacular headache. I was laying on something, and my spine was twisted in a rather uncomfortable position.

"Sam."

I heard Dean's rasping whisper close by, but I couldn't see him anywhere.

"Sam." he repeated, louder this time. I looked around a little, trying not to move my head too much, but I still couldn't see Dean.

It was at that point that the uncomfortable thing I was laying on _moved_. My heart skipped a beat, and I froze.

"Sam, get off me!" Dean demanded, annoyance creeping into his voice.

It took me a second, but my brain eventually worked it out. Dean was still laying where the loup-garou had thrown him - where I'd then crashed into him, and evidently passed out across his chest.

I sat up slowly, my head spinning a little, and heard Dean take a few deep breaths. "Dude, you're heavy. You know that?" he groaned, and I looked back over my shoulder at him. There were a series of parallel tears in his jacket at the top of his left arm and the black fabric was dark and shiny with blood, but I couldn't see any other damage.

"You okay?" I asked, and he groaned again. "I'm _awesome_." he rolled his eyes and winced when he tried to sit up. "You might wanna go easy on your left shoulder, there." I advised, and Dean looked at me witheringly. Before he could make some sarcastic remark about stating the obvious, his expression changed suddenly as something more important occurred to him.

"Did we get it?" His voice had a tense edge as he looked quickly around the cemetery for any sign of a giant, man-eating wolf. "We must've got it, right? I mean, we're still alive." he went on, eyes still scanning the area around us. My heart fluttered as I remembered the wolf - believe it or not, I'd actually kind of forgotten about that.

"I hit it with the dart, and filled its chest _full_ of silver..." I frowned and started looking around too, doubts suddenly nagging at me. If Alain Johns had been wrong about the wolfsbane, or if we'd missed something in the mythology... well, it was pretty simple, really: if we _hadn't_ killed the loup-garou, then we were as good as dead. A sudden chill rolled over me that had nothing to do with the snow.

Dean and I searched our surroundings, both staying as still as possible while we did so. My heart rate climbed steadily as I strained to see anything through the snow and the darkness. It hadn't been this dark before, I was sure - the moon had lit up the graveyard like daylight, and I'd been able to see everything. While I'd been unconscious the clouds had rolled in and mostly blocked out the moon, and Wildwood Cemetery was now uncomfortably and dangerously dark.

"I don't see anything." Dean whispered, so low I almost didn't hear him. "Me neither." I breathed, and I heard Dean exhale slowly. "If it were still alive, it would've torn us apart by -" I stopped mid-sentence as my eyes locked on something in the darkness.

"What is it?" Dean hissed, and I got slowly to my feet. "It's over here." I walked gingerly in the direction of a snow-covered mound half-hidden by a tree about 15 feet away. "And?" I heard Dean moving around behind me, slowly climbing to his own feet and retrieving his gun from the grass. I heard the metallic _click_ as he cocked the hammer.

"It's the loup-garou." I confirmed, when I got close enough to see. The snow had mostly camouflaged the charcoal fur and made it pretty hard to spot against the background, but it would take a helluva lot more snow than this to hide that monster. "It's not moving." I added, hanging back. I wasn't sure I really wanted to go poking at the thing and find out for sure if it was dead or not.

Even still and snow-covered as it was, the loup-garou looked terrifying. It hadn't turned back into its human form after it died, which was one more thing to ass to the list of weird things about this case. I could still see its razor claws, staring blue eyes, and the long canines in its mouth, which was open in its last snarl of rage and pain.

"If it's still alive, we're dead anyway. Kick it already." Dean called, from his spot leaning up against the tree that had knocked us both out. "Easy for you to say." I muttered, but took my foot back and kicked the loup-garou firmly in the shoulder with the toe of my boot. I tensed as I did, my body prepared to take off running in the other direction if the beast moved so much as a whisker.

It didn't, though. My kick dislodged some snow, revealing part of its chest - the fur was slick with blood, and the snow around it was stained red. I kicked it again, harder, but still got no response. I let out a sigh of relief, and heard a similar sound from Dean. We'd done it - we got the loup-garou before it got us.

I turned away from the wolf and headed slowly back to Dean. "So what is it with you and werewolves?" I asked, my feet crunching in the fresh snow as I walked. "They're always knocking you out." I smiled, and Dean gave me a look. His heart wasn't in it, though - I knew he was as relieved as I was to be walking away from this hunt. "We can't just leave that there." he said, nodding in the direction of the dead loup-garou. I stood next to him and considered that for a minute.

"Wanna burn it?" I asked, and a little smile touched Dean's lips. "I really, really do." he replied, and pulled a small can of lighter fluid out of one jacket pocket. "You've been waiting for this, haven't you?" I asked, following Dean over to the dark shape in the snow. "What, the opportunity to torch something that looks exactly like the Hellhound that dragged me into the Pit?" he said, and I heard a smile in his words.

He stopped next to the loup-garou, and paused for a second before he doused it in the entire can of lighter fluid. It was far enough from the tree and there was enough snow on the ground for us to be sure the fire wouldn't spread, thank God. I certainly didn't feel like lugging the thing out into the open - if Dean and I could even have moved it at all, considering how much it must've weighed and how beaten up we were. He used a lighter to ignite the accelerant, and we stood back and watched the beast burn. Thick, black smoke poured off the carcass as its hair caught, and we stepped back a little further. Burning hair is one of the most unpleasant smells I've come across - and that's saying something.

"You know, you were right." Dean said suddenly, as he stared into the orange flames. "About what?" I asked, glancing over at him. "The loup-garou. When I saw it, I thought for a second I was seeing a Hellhound, and it scared the crap out of me." he admitted, eyes still focused firmly on the fire. I stayed quiet, praying he'd keep talking. "Ever since we laid eyes on it, I've been having nightmares about that Hellhound. About what it did, and also about the fact it didn't do as much damage as this loup-garou." he sighed, and closed his eyes. I could hardly believe my ears - here was Dean initiating a 'chick-flick moment'.

"Burning this monster is cathartic, huh?" I asked, but it was more of a statement than a question. The relieved, relaxed look on Dean's face told me all I needed to know. "Oh yeah. I can't burn the Hellhound, so this is the next best thing." he opened his eyes and smiled at me. A genuine smile like I hadn't seen since we started this hunt, and I found myself smiling back. Knowing Dean was feeling better was like a weight lifted off my shoulders.

"I'm gonna sleep a helluva lot better knowing this thing's not running around under the full moon." he added, wrinkling his nose as the wind shifted slightly and blew some of the acrid black smoke our way. "Me too." I replied, looking up at the moon - it was still mostly obscured by clouds, and it occurred to me as I stood there that I wasn't thinking about Madison. I hadn't really thought about her since Dean's loup-garou-induced near-meltdown had started. I'd been too worried about my brother for the last month to indulge my own demons, which was probably a good thing - between Madison and the loup-garou, I'd have had no sleep at all.

"We'd better get outta here. Someone's gonna report the smoke soon, if they haven't already." Dean said after a minute, and interrupted my reverie. The flames were lower now, and the black smoke wasn't as thick, but it had a greasy quality to it and the air was filled with the smell of burning meat. The fire was slowly but steadily eating away the body of the beast, and it was definitely time to go. We didn't need to explain to police and fire why we were standing around a lop-garou bonfire.

Dean took one last look at the burning wolf, then turned and headed back in the direction of the Impala. I fell into step beside him, and we got into the car just as we heard sirens in the distance. "You want to get that shoulder checked out?" I asked Dean, as he started the drive back to our motel one-handed, with his injured left arm laying in his lap. "Nah. It'll be fine with a little cleaning." he replied, holding the arm a little closer to his body. "Honestly, Sam, right now all I want to do is sleep."

* * *

><p><em>I do like a good old-fashioned monster hunt :)<em>  
><em>Now it's your turn - what did you think of my monster? The only way to tell me is to review ;)<em>

_If you liked this fic, hit one of the 'share' buttons at the top of the page and tell someone!_


End file.
